From the Mouths of the Caves – Listening to Hear Another Island’s Song
From the Mouths of the Caves – Listening to Hear Another Island’s Song is an inter-island visual art project that brings together children from Svalbard and the Scottish islands of Iona and Mull through a shared exploration of island life, ocean systems, and creative exchange. Developed and hosted by artists Mhairi Killin and Floortje Zonneveld in collaboration with Artica Svalbard, Longyearbyen Skole and Longyearbyen Kulturskole, the project invites young participants to reflect on their relationship with the sea and the landscapes that shape their communities.
The project takes inspiration from two elemental spaces: an ice cave in Svalbard and a sea cave on the Isle of Iona in Scotland. These environments serve as symbolic and material starting points for thinking about how island ecologies are connected across distance. Through visual art workshops, sound, storytelling, and sensory learning experiences, participants explore how coastal knowledge, cultural identity, and environmental change are expressed within island communities.
In February and March 2026, Mhairi Killin and Floortje Zonneveld were in residence at Artica Svalbard for six weeks to develop the project. Both artists share a deep connection to remote island landscapes and recognise these places as powerful sites for understanding the lived realities of environmental change. Working across art, science, and storytelling, they led a month-long programme of workshops in Longyearbyen, engaging 40 children from Longyearbyen Skole and Kulturskolen.
Through drawing, sound, storytelling, and collaborative making, the workshops encouraged children to consider the shared oceanic systems linking Arctic and Hebridean islands, and the ways climate change is reshaping these environments. The project also explores how ecological knowledge and cultural identity are carried through language, from Gaelic in the Hebrides to the many languages spoken in Svalbard’s international community. By foregrounding the perspectives of young people, the project seeks to amplify voices that are often absent from environmental discourse, creating a living archive of shared island knowledge.
The Svalbard workshops build on earlier collaboration between artists and scientists, including a pilot Gaelic-language workshop held on Iona and Mull in November 2025. Materials and recordings from these sessions introduced the Hebridean islands to participants in Svalbard, forming the starting point for the exchange between the two island communities. The project will continue in summer 2026 with a further month of school workshops on Iona and Mull, culminating in a public presentation at Iona Village Hall and an online sharing connecting the island communities.
The children’s work developed during the Svalbard workshops was presented in a public exhibition at Artica Svalbard in March 2026, offering a glimpse into how young islanders imagine their place within wider oceanic and ecological systems.
The residency also involved collaboration with Siri Granum Carson, Professor of Applied Ethics at NTNU and co-chair of the European Ocean Research and Education Alliance (EOREA). Through her work in transdisciplinary ocean research and responsible research and innovation (RRI), Carson contributed to the project’s exploration of how artistic practice can help move from ocean knowledge to deeper ocean understanding, while connecting the artists with research communities at NTNU and UNIS.
Artists
Mhairi Killin is a visual artist from the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. Her work examines the fragile relationships between land, sea, humans, and other beings, challenging perceptions of islands as remote or marginal places. Working across drawing, print, sculpture, and film, she explores how belief systems—religious, mythic, and socio-political—shape both physical and metaphysical landscapes. Her recent collaborative project On Sonorous Seas brings together voices from art, science, and poetry to question the militarisation of Scotland’s seas and its impact on marine life. Killin has exhibited internationally and undertaken residencies across Scotland, Scandinavia, and Canada. In 2024 she received support from Creative Scotland for a residency at Artica Svalbard, nominated by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA).
Floortje Zonneveld is an artist and expedition leader working with time-based and participatory projects across remote Nordic regions including Svalbard, Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. She collaborates with communities to re-explore their landscapes through shared storytelling, transforming local experiences into immersive artistic narratives. A certified Arctic Nature Guide, she has spent many years guiding expeditions through polar environments while developing projects that strengthen connections between people, place, and ecological change. Zonneveld is a long-time collaborator with Artica Svalbard, having led several community-based projects including Shadowing Without a Sunset, Future Community Garden, and The Slow Adventure: A Year Without Trees.
You can follow the project here: from the mouths of the caves
The residency is supported by TIDAL ArtS, the European Union, and Sparebankstiftelsen.