Mhairi Killin

In Residence: January - April 2026

Mhairi Killin is a visual artist from the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. Working across drawing, print, sculpture, and film, her practice explores the fragile and interconnected relationships between land, sea, humans, and other beings, often challenging perceptions of islands as remote or marginal.

Killin returns to Artica Svalbard for a third residency, following her earlier stay in 2025 and her initial residency in 2024, which was supported through a nomination by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Her ongoing engagement with Svalbard reflects a sustained commitment to exploring connections between northern island environments and her home in the Hebrides.

Central to Killin’s practice is an interest in how place-based knowledge, belief systems, and ecological awareness are shaped through lived experience. Her work often draws on mythology, oral traditions, and site-responsive processes to examine how landscapes are inhabited, understood, and narrated across time.

During her residency, Killin will develop work as part of the collaborative project From the Mouths of the Caves – Listening to Hear Another Island’s Song. The project draws inspiration from two elemental sites: an ice cave in Svalbard and a sea cave on Iona. Through the materiality and symbolism of these spaces, the project considers how knowledge can be exchanged across island environments and how distant geographies are connected through shared ecological systems.

Referencing early Gaelic praise poetry—in which bards would situate themselves metaphorically in the “mouth of the Saint” to speak with another voice—Killin approaches the caves as sites of articulation and resonance. Through this framework, she seeks to develop a call-and-response between the two island landscapes, exploring how Svalbard and Iona are entangled within broader narratives of climate change and oceanic interconnection.

This residency is supported by: