About The Artist.

Siobhan Kay McMorran is an Edinburgh-based artist currently completing an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Working primarily in ink, her practice explores how memory, bodily perception, and landscape intersect. Her paintings construct atmospheric environments that sit between the observed and the internalised, using tonal depth, repetition, and negative space to evoke psychological and collective histories embedded in place.

Operating between drawing and painting, her work resists fixed viewpoints. Landscapes emerge through accumulation and erosion, suggesting terrain as a living archive rather than a static image.

Practice & Material

McMorran’s process begins with walking, photography, and prolonged looking. These acts function as forms of attunement rather than documentation, allowing specific sites to be revisited through material translation. Fine line mark-making is layered with fluid ink washes, creating a dialogue between control and dispersal. Precision is often interrupted by the autonomous movement of ink across the surface, producing stains, bleeds, and sediment-like deposits.

Recent large-scale works introduce a physical negotiation between body and paper. Scale shifts the act of painting from a contained gesture to an immersive encounter, where reach, balance, and duration become compositional factors. Through layering and subtraction, forms hover at the edge of legibility—trees dissolving into shadow, paths emerging through tonal variation, structures suggested rather than defined.

Ink functions as both medium and temporal record, holding traces of pressure, pause, and return.

Research & Methodology

Her current research considers embodied perception as a framework for understanding landscape. Prior to a recent combined autism and ADHD diagnosis, her work had already been shaped by a sustained investigation into chronic pain, informed by her lived experience of fibromyalgia and scoliosis and articulated in her research paper Art as an Alternative Language for Pain. These conditions function not as subject matter but as structuring methodologies, shaping tempo, repetition, and spatial density.

Sensory processing, fatigue, and altered spatial awareness influence how she approaches scale, duration, and mark-making, generating works that register stillness, hyper-focus, and moments of overwhelm through rhythm, saturation, and void. In this context, ink becomes a responsive material capable of holding pressure, pause, and fluctuation - operating as a non-verbal language for embodied states that resist direct representation.

This enquiry intersects with her engagement with place attachment theory, collective memory, and the concept of cianalas, a form of longing rooted in landscape and lineage. Rather than illustrating these ideas, her work uses material behaviour and spatial ambiguity to produce an affective response in the viewer.

Landscape, Memory & History

Raised between Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands, McMorran’s practice is informed by environments where natural and human histories overlap: ancient pine forests, coastal paths, and sites marked by quiet habitation. Family narratives and intergenerational memory form a subtle but persistent undercurrent, positioning landscape as a site of continuity and return.

Her paintings often begin with photographs taken during solitary walks, but the resulting works move beyond documentation towards an emotional cartography of place. Recurrent motifs - tree lines, narrow paths, thresholds, and structures partially obscured - suggest spaces of transition, belonging, and distance.

Context & Influences

Influenced by traditional ink painting alongside contemporary landscape practices, McMorran’s methodology is grounded in slowness, repetition, and material sensitivity. The discipline of grinding ink, balancing composition, and working through incremental layering informs her approach to surface and time.

Seasonal growing and gardening operate as an extension of her studio practice, shaping an understanding of cyclical duration, care, and attunement to environmental rhythms. These temporal structures parallel the accumulative nature of her mark-making.

Exhibitions & Collections

McMorran has exhibited in group contexts and is currently developing a body of large-scale ink works in the lead-up to her graduation from Central Saint Martins. Her work is held in private collections in the UK.

A full portfolio and available works list can be provided on request. For exhibition and acquisition enquiries, please use the contact page.