One morning earlier this year, I was in my garden with the Merlin bird ID app open when I realised I was surrounded by a charm of goldfinches. With their vibrant energy and beautiful song, the goldfinch is celebrated in European folklore as the bird of joy. In Scottish Gaelic culture, she is the lasair-choille, or the flash of the forest, with her yellow wings and flecks of red. In Scots poetry, she is the goldie, or gowdspink, embodying the spirit of resistance, renewal, possibility and freedom. For me, the goldfinch is a wee hopeful inspiration – a reminder to break free from constraints, to live life on our own terms, to appreciate the beauty in small things.

I’d like to think that in some ways, the spirit of the goldfinch shapes my own work. I’m an independent freelancer and creative collaborator, working across the interconnected roles of educator, researcher, writer, organiser, facilitator, and creative practitioner. At the heart of my practice is the idea of cultural repair: mending fractured relationships between people and the living systems that sustain us, advocating for regenerative and convivial alternatives to extractive systems. I am particularly interested in how folk knowledge and cultural memory can serve as tools of resistance and renewal in our time of ecological and social crisis. Though my work takes many forms, it is united by a commitment to imagining and building more hopeful futures.

Over the years, I’ve collaborated with a range of organisations, institutions and an interdisciplinary network of artists, educators, and practitioners. I’ve held residencies, contributed to exhibitions and publications – print and online – and hosted courses, podcasts and gatherings. My own events bring hopeful and radical ideas to life through shared cultural experiences – whether that’s through music and song, or conversations that imagine more hopeful futures rooted in connection, joy and solidarity.

A lot of my recent work is in collaboration with Raghnaid Sandilands. Together, we’ve developed a practice of cultural darning and mending – finding disparate threads from the past and weaving them back together with care and purpose. The idea is that while we acknowledge that we cannot mend the whole, we can make small acts of repair that can nurture imaginations and invite people to enter into an ethical and reciprocal relationship with the land, its past, people and their stories. This idea shaped our residency with the Findhorn Watershed Initiative (2023-2025), where we explored the role of culture and creativity in rekindling relationships of care for and stewardship of the river Findhorn. We also created work for ‘A Fragile Correspondence’ at the International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2023), re-staged at the V&A Dundee (2024-2025).

I am currently working as a research consultant with Professor Katie Boyle (University of Strathclyde), bringing together human rights law and cultural heritage to argue that the protection of biodiversity and the protection of cultural diversity are inseparable. Our work explores how communities who carry custodial ecological knowledge – held in oral tradition, song, language and living practice – can be recognised and supported within international human rights and nature restoration frameworks. This builds on a British Academy policy discussion paper, for which I was lead author, addressing place-sensitive approaches to nature recovery in the Scottish Highlands, or Gàidhealtachd.

I also contribute to education in different ways, teaching short courses such as Tobar an Dualchais: Creative Connections, for people (visual artists, writers, musicians, budding-folklorists and creative educators) who want to learn more about the resource of folk culture through the lens of cultural ecology and environmental awareness. I have also worked with the Centre for Human Ecology, teaching online courses exploring degrowth, decolonisation and climate justice in a Scottish context.

My academic background is in creative ethnology and human ecology – two fields that deeply inform my practice. Ethnology is a form of anthropology, focused on understanding the relationship between people and place. Human ecology explores the connections between nature, culture, society and economy, integrating environmental and social justice.

Before moving north, I taught in the Department of Celtic & Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh and at Newbattle Abbey College, and held research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, Heriot-Watt University and Edinburgh College of Art. I hold an award-winning PhD in ethnology and ethnomusicology from the University of Edinburgh (2012).

Closer to home, I stay involved in my local community. I serve on my village hall committee and act as a trustee for the Abriachan Forest Trust, where I’m learning about community land ownership, forest management, and forest school education. I also play piano in the local cèilidh band and try to grow vegetables – sometimes successfully!

If you're interested in working together, you can find my freelance services listed here, a portfolio of past projects here, and my full CV here. Feel free to reach out!