Unit 3 Assessment.

My PracticeResearchArtistic ProcessMaterials
Written By Siobhan McMorran

Learning Outcome 1: Present evidence of a body of work that demonstrates a systematic enhancement of your knowledge and understanding. (AC Realisation)

Unit 3 has marked the most significant shift in my practice across the whole MA. Where earlier units were defined by a gradual deepening of material knowledge and conceptual focus, this unit has seen those threads pulled tightly together into something I can now recognise as a coherent body of work. The paintings, sketchbooks, research, and place-based work all speak to one another in a way that feels genuinely new.

The completion of Gynack in March 2026 was a turning point. It was the first painting I finished following my autism and ADHD diagnosis, and it introduced a different quality of making: one that trusted instinct over analysis, that prioritised the momentum of mark-making over self-editing. The abstract textures developing in my sketchbook finally broke through into a larger piece, and the sketchbook practice has remained central throughout the unit, sustaining momentum during periods of lower energy and providing the experimental space from which the current series has grown.

The A1 painting series, developed in preparation for the CSM final show, represents the fullest realisation of that development. Scaling up to A1 while keeping the brushstrokes deliberately small and intricate has introduced a new tension into the work: something quiet and considered, given more room to breathe. The paintings are all rooted in photographs taken in the Cairngorms, drawing on the embodied, place-based understanding developed through the research into Thomson and Shepherd across the course. The influence of Kiefer, seen in person at the Van Gogh Museum earlier in the MA, and Kees Stoop's principle of simplification as deliberate withholding rather than reduction, have both shaped how the series approaches scale, atmosphere, and the refusal to resolve into narrative. What the sketchbook made possible, the A1 series is now making real.

The Kingussie trip in late April was perhaps the most important practical development of the unit. Returning to the Highland landscapes that have underpinned so much of my practice, and bringing two finished paintings (Gynack and Creag Bheag) back to photograph in the places that inspired them, introduced the idea of returning work to its source. Seeing the paintings there changed how I understood them. They appeared to merge into the landscape in a way I had not anticipated, their marks echoing what was happening around them. This experience has opened up questions about presentation, place, and the relationship between studio work and site that I intend to continue developing beyond the MA.

A significant material development has been the research into natural dyes and plant-derived inks, prompted by the Unit 2 feedback's suggestion to think about materials that carry their own relationship to the subject matter. Discovering that the marigolds grown in the garden every year can be used to make painting ink collapsed the distance between the site of growing and the site of making in a way that feels methodologically significant. Having now sown a much larger crop with the intention of drying and processing them in autumn, this investigation has introduced a genuinely different relationship to materials: one shaped by seasonal cycles, patience, and an attentiveness to what is already present in daily life rather than what can be immediately purchased.

The reclaimed canvases project has brought a parallel material and conceptual inquiry. Working on supports that would otherwise be discarded, priming over existing images and painting on top of them, connects to the broader questions of place and ecology running through the practice, but it also carries a more specific conceptual weight. The act of concealing one surface beneath another and allowing something new to emerge on top feels closely tied to the ideas around neurodivergence and masking that have been central to Unit 3. Amanda Thomson writes about landscape as a place where the layers society places on us begin to fall away; the reclaimed canvas enacts something similar physically. The process of painting without a plan or reference image on these surfaces was also revealing: without the usual dialogue between observed subject and canvas, the work became more alert, more immediate, and more dependent on accumulated textured marks rather than resolved single strokes. That comparison between solid ink and layered textured brushstrokes has sharpened understanding of why the newer approaches to mark-making feel more honest to neurodivergent experience.

Links & Notes

Learning Outcome 2: Synthesise and critically reflect coherently on your process whilst providing evidence of an active, independent and/or collaborative practice. (AC Process)

The process work of Unit 3 has been shaped by two interconnected shifts: the deepening of my engagement with neurodivergence as both a subject and a methodological lens, and a more committed relationship with landscape as something experienced and inhabited, rather than merely observed.

My autism and ADHD diagnosis brought into focus ideas I had been circling for some time, particularly around alexithymia, the difficulty of recognising and naming one's own emotional states. Sitting with this has led to a series of reflective posts that have helped me understand painting less as self-expression and more as a form of translation. The marks are not illustrations of feeling; they are the process through which something unnamed becomes, if not articulated, then at least externalised. This has changed how I approach the act of making. There is less pressure on individual marks to mean something, and more trust in the accumulated whole.

Reading Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World was significant for this unit, arriving at a moment when I was thinking about pace, growth, and what it means to work in conditions that resist easy mastery. Tsing's ideas about assemblage, collaborative survival, and patchy time connected directly to how I have been approaching the practice, particularly in relation to chronic illness, rest, and the kind of making that is possible on difficult days. Her framework gave language to something already present in the work: that value accumulates through attention and pattern, not through consistent linear output.

Research into Richard Long and Hamish Fulton also clarified the place-based dimension of my practice. Thinking about their relationship between walking, body, and mark helped me understand what I am doing differently. I am not making work in the landscape, but bringing work back to it. The act of returning Gynack and Creag Bheag to Kingussie was a practice-based experiment in this distinction, and the experience confirmed that the relationship between painting and place in my work is genuinely reciprocal.

Two further strands of contextual research sharpened the process thinking across the unit. The Alfred Buckham exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery raised questions about what it means to carry a place: his hand-assembled aerial photographs of Scotland, constructed in the darkroom from multiple negatives, are not direct records but made things, assembled from fragments through physical contact with materials. That tension between the experience of being somewhere and the object made afterwards feels close to questions at the centre of my own practice. Engaging with the emerging field of mycoaesthetics, prompted by the April tutorial, added a further critical layer: reading Cecire and Solomon's writing on the "mycological turn" introduced a useful caution against using the mycelial network as comfortable shorthand for connection, and reinforced a commitment to noticing rather than resolving that runs through the reflective writing across the unit.

A dedicated post revisiting the Unit 2 to do list provides an honest accounting of what has been engaged with, what developed in unexpected directions (the marigold ink emerging from the suggestion about tree-derived materials; Tsing from the prompt to think about bodies and non-verbal language), and what has been consciously set aside. This is not failure but a deliberate recognition of which threads belong to this phase and which belong to what comes next.

The 1-2-1 tutorials have been important points of external reflection throughout the unit. The February tutorial led to clarity about painting as translation and opened up thinking about chaos and control that has continued to inform the work. The April tutorial, held just after returning from Kingussie, covered the practical challenges of capturing landscape audio in the field, introduced Nora Bateson's concept of warm data and her book Combining as directly relevant to the relational qualities in the practice, and opened up plans for the end-of-year show, including displaying the Kingussie photographs alongside the finished paintings. Jonathan also described the PhD themes as urgent and timely, which has reinforced the sense that this is the right moment to be moving in that direction.

Links & Notes

Learning Outcome 3: Summarise and evaluate your overall progress and formulate a constructive plan for continuing Personal and Professional Development. (AC Communication)

Looking back across the full arc of the MA, the clearest sign of progress is the growing coherence between what I make, what I research, and how I reflect. In Unit 1, these strands were present but running in parallel. By Unit 2 they had begun to intersect, with the research into pain and embodiment informing the material choices and the reflective writing beginning to function as a genuine companion to making. In Unit 3, they feel genuinely integrated. The practice has a language of its own, and I can trace how it got there.

The most important shift has been in my relationship with my own neurodivergent and chronic illness experience: not as subject matter to manage or explain, but as a methodology. Alexithymia has moved from something I was researching to something I am working from. Pacing the practice around energy and illness has become not a limitation but a kind of knowledge. These are not decorative frames for the work; they are constitutive of how it is made.

The research and practice of the MA has crystallised a longer-term question that I intend to pursue formally. The draft PhD proposal, titled Dùthchas: Landscape, Neurodivergence, and the Material Body in Practice-Based Research, sets out a practice-based inquiry into what it means to make art from the body outward, with particular focus on the Scottish Highlands as a site of identity, memory, and physical attunement, and on alexithymia and chronic illness as methodological conditions rather than obstacles. The proposal draws together all the major threads of the MA: the landscape work, the material research into plant-derived inks, the embodied and neurodivergent perspective, and the theoretical frameworks of Tsing, Shepherd, Thomson, and Scarry. The Herbology exhibition at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh was one of several contextual encounters this unit that fed directly into this thinking, connecting the landscape themes in my practice to histories of plant knowledge and the domestic, threads that run straight into the marigold ink research and the proposal's framing of gardening as method. Writing the proposal has clarified not just where I want to go but why the work already made is the right foundation from which to go there.

In parallel, thinking about a solo show between the end of the MA and a potential 2027 PhD start has given professional shape to the coming period. The ideas developing around installation, bringing landscape footage and field recordings into the exhibition space, splitting audiences to test how language frames the experience of the work, and drawing on the Goldsworthy Gravestones room at the RSA as a model for the quality of stillness I want to create, represent the most developed thinking I have done about audience and presentation across the whole course.

Links & Notes

Siobhan McMorran
Next

A1 Painting Series.