Draft PhD Research Proposal.
Proposed Title: Dùthchas: Landscape, Neurodivergence, and the Material Body in Practice-Based Research
Practice Type: Practice-Based PhD
AIMS.
This research asks what it means to make art from the body outward: not from concept to material, but from sensation, place, and embodied experience toward meaning. It seeks to investigate the relationship between neurodivergent experience, chronic illness, and landscape as both subject and method in a sustained practice-based inquiry, with particular focus on the Scottish Highlands as a site of identity, memory, and physical attunement.
The central research question is: How can practice-based art research develop new frameworks for understanding embodied, non-verbal experience (including alexithymia, chronic pain, and sensory difference) through the materials, rhythms, and scales of landscape?
Secondary questions include:
What happens when materials are sourced from, and responsive to, the same landscape that shapes the psychological and emotional content of the work?
How does working with slow, seasonal, and plant-derived materials (including naturally produced inks) alter the relationship between the artist's body, time, and place?
Can abstract mark-making practice function as a legible, shared language for experiences that resist verbal articulation, and if so, what does that mean for how the work is presented and received?
The proposed outcome will be a body of creative work (paintings, drawings, and potentially installation) alongside a written thesis that positions this practice within current debates in neurodivergent art, material culture, non-representational theory, and slow art. The work will explicitly address practice-based research as a mode of inquiry appropriate to, and shaped by, neurodivergent and chronically ill bodies.
Context.
The work sits at the intersection of several fields that have, until recently, rarely been brought into direct dialogue: practice-based art research, neurodiversity studies, non-representational and more-than-human geographies, and the emerging field of crip and disability aesthetics.
Within art practice, there is a growing body of work concerned with place, landscape, and the body. The land art lineage of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton established a precedent for the body as both method and medium in relation to landscape: Long's work makes the walk itself the sculpture, while Fulton refuses to alter the landscape, producing instead objects that point back toward experiences already passed into memory. Both practices raise questions that remain central to this research — what does it mean to make work in response to a place rather than simply depicting it, and how do you make the relationship between a body, a place, and an artwork visible to someone who was not present for its making?
Andy Goldsworthy extends this lineage through an attentiveness to material, time, and the slow transformations of the natural world, while Giuseppe Penone's work — in which the body and tree are made to rhyme structurally and metaphorically — has been particularly important in shaping how this research understands the relationship between chronic physical difference and the forms that living things make as they grow and adapt. Anselm Kiefer's monumental engagement with landscape, memory, and material weight offers another point of orientation, particularly in relation to the emotional and historical freight that place can carry.
Within Scottish and specifically Highland contexts, the work of Amanda Thomson is a significant precedent and touchstone. Thomson's practice as a visual artist and writer — whose own practice-based PhD engaged with the forests of Abernethy and Morayshire, landscapes adjacent to Kingussie — moves between image, text, and the Scots and Gaelic vocabularies of landscape in ways that this research will think with directly. Her book Belonging in particular, with its focus on snags, northern landscapes, identity, and the pinewoods of Abernethy, speaks directly to the concerns of this project.
The writing of Nan Shepherd is equally important. The Living Mountain, Shepherd's sustained meditation on the Cairngorms as a place to be entered rather than conquered, articulates a way of knowing landscape through embodied, sensory attention that is closely related to what this research is attempting to enact in practice. Shepherd's insistence that the mountain is known through the whole body, not only through the eye, offers a critical and poetic framework for understanding how neurodivergent and chronically ill experience might constitute its own mode of attentiveness rather than a deficit.
My work engages with all of these traditions while departing from them in significant ways: where Long and Fulton's practices tend toward an almost philosophical neutrality of the human body, this research insists on the particular, uneven, sensory-different body as the site of knowledge production. And where much landscape art practice positions the artist as relatively able-bodied walker and observer, this project asks what happens when the body that moves through landscape is a body shaped by chronic pain, hypermobility, and a different relationship to sensory information.
The concept of alexithymia (the difficulty of identifying, labelling, and describing emotional states) has received limited attention within art research, despite its prevalence in the neurodivergent community. Existing literature on art and emotion tends to assume relatively direct access to one's own feeling states, which is not the experience of a significant portion of the population. This research seeks to address that gap, proposing that art practice may function not as a direct expression of emotion, but as a space in which emotions are discovered, processed, and communicated through means that bypass verbal language entirely.
Anna Tsing's thinking on assemblage, collaborative survival, and what she terms "patchy time" offers a useful theoretical frame for understanding how a practice shaped by chronic illness and neurodivergence operates: not through linear progress or consistent output, but through the accumulation of attention, the reading of patterns, and the willingness to work with rather than against the rhythms of one's own body and environment. This connects naturally to a material practice rooted in growing, harvesting, and slowly preparing plant-derived inks, a process that cannot be hurried, and that asks the maker to plan seasonally rather than on demand.
The Scottish Highlands, and Kingussie in particular, operate in this research as more than backdrop or subject matter. They constitute a psychogeographical and biographical site: the landscape that shaped a formative period of childhood, that carries family history and ancestral belonging, and that continues to communicate something that is difficult to reach through other means. The proposal draws on growing scholarship in place-based research and Scottish art, while foregrounding the question of what it means to return to a landscape not as a researcher studying it from the outside but as someone for whom it is already an internalised vocabulary.
The research will draw on, among others: the work of Anna Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World); Nan Shepherd (The Living Mountain); Amanda Thomson (Belonging, A Scots Dictionary of Nature); Elaine Scarry (The Body in Pain); Sue Black (Written in Bone); Elinor Cleghorn (Unwell Women); Gina Rippon (The Lost Girls of Autism); scholarship on alexithymia and neurodivergent experience (Bird, Cook); disability aesthetics and crip theory (Kuppers, Sandahl); and more-than-human geographies (Thrift, Ingold).
Methods.
This is a practice-led inquiry in which the creative work and the written research develop in dialogue, each informing and reshaping the other.
The primary method is studio practice: painting and drawing in ink on canvas and paper, initially using commercial inks and progressively transitioning to plant-derived inks produced through the growing and harvesting of marigolds, oak galls, and other botanicals that carry their own relationship to the landscapes under investigation. This material shift is not incidental: it is itself a research method, a way of embedding the temporal, seasonal, and ecological logic of the landscape into the very substance of the work.
Fieldwork in the Scottish Highlands, particularly Kingussie and its surroundings, will form a core component of the research. This will involve extended visits in which walking, photography, video, and the collection of botanical material are undertaken as embodied research practices: not illustrative of the work but constitutive of it. The practice of returning to the same places over time, across different seasons and states of body and mind, is central to the methodological approach.
A third strand of method, less conventional but central to the research, is gardening. The allotment that I tend with my partner, now in its third year, is not a backdrop to the practice or a source of relaxation separate from it: it is part of the practice itself. The rhythms of growing, the attentiveness required by weeding, the reading of what is thriving and what needs more care, operate on the same frequency as the work in the studio. Both require presence without agenda, a willingness to be led by something other than a fixed plan, and a tolerance for processes that cannot be hurried.
This relationship to growing and tending is not new. It runs back through my life from childhood, through a family in which plants and gardens have always carried meaning: through the lupins and vegetables of Carrbridge, through a granddad who kept allotments into his nineties, and through a family copy of Culpeper's Complete Herbal, originally published in 1653, passed down through my mother's family. The 1846 edition I have inherited is filled with handwritten margin notes and botanical illustrations that I have treasured since childhood. That book, and the herbological knowledge it represents, is part of the same thread as the allotment and the marigolds: an inherited attentiveness to what plants can do, and what they carry.
The allotment is also, increasingly, a material source. Marigolds grown there are being harvested and dried for use as painting ink, collapsing the distance between the site of growing and the site of making in a way that feels methodologically significant. The PhD will take this seriously as a research method, thinking through what it means for the practice to be rooted not only in a distant Highland landscape but also in the soil of an Edinburgh plot tended week by week, in all weathers and all seasons.
Alongside studio, field, and garden practice, the research will involve a sustained reflective writing practice, building on the journal methodology already developed across the MA. This writing functions simultaneously as documentation, analysis, and artistic output: it is not separate from the creative work but part of the same inquiry.
The research will also engage with questions of display and audience encounter, investigating what it means to present work rooted in non-verbal and alexithymic experience to audiences who may or may not share that experience. Experimental installation formats, potentially including sound drawn from the landscapes that generated the paintings, will be explored as a way of extending the dialogue beyond the picture plane and testing whether immersive encounter produces a different kind of recognition.
Where appropriate, the research will be situated in dialogue with neurodivergent and chronically ill communities, as collaborators in understanding and testing the communicative possibilities of the work rather than as subjects of it.
Impact.
This research addresses a genuine and underexplored gap in the field. While practice-based art research has expanded significantly as a discipline, and while disability studies has produced important theoretical frameworks, the specific intersection of neurodivergent and chronic illness experience with landscape-based art practice and material research remains largely underexplored. This project has the potential to contribute meaningfully to each of the fields it touches.
For art practice and art research, it offers a model for how embodied difference, rather than being a constraint on practice, can function as the engine of a distinctive methodological and aesthetic approach. It proposes that working slowly, seasonally, and in deep attunement with place is not a compromise but a rigorous and generative research method.
For neurodivergent and chronically ill communities, the work and its accompanying research could provide a meaningful articulation of how art practice functions as an alternative language: one that does not demand verbal fluency in one's own emotional life but instead creates conditions for connection, recognition, and shared experience without explanation or translation.
The research also has the potential to contribute to broader conversations about sustainability and slow practice in art, at a moment when these questions are increasingly urgent. Growing and preparing one's own materials, working in seasonal time, maintaining a practice that is shaped by rather than resistant to the limits of the body: these are not simply personal accommodations but propositions about how art might be made and what it might mean.
Planned dissemination will include exhibition of the creative work in gallery and alternative contexts, academic publication, public engagement through writing and talks, and ongoing documentation through the practice journal that has been central to the MA.
A Note on Proposed Supervision.
I am seeking supervision from staff whose expertise encompasses practice-based research with interests in landscape, embodiment, material culture, or neurodivergent experience, or some combination of these. I welcome the opportunity to discuss the project further and am open to supervision arrangements that draw on expertise across more than one area.
This is a draft proposal developed as part of my Unit 3 assessment, as I begin to think concretely about what a PhD might look like and where my practice is heading. It represents my current thinking rather than a final position, and I expect the research questions and framing to evolve as I continue to make work and read more widely in the field.
Word count: approximately 2,000 words (excluding this note)
