Hugo Burge Foundation Residency Success

I'm absolutely thrilled to have been awarded the Hugo Burge Foundation Botanical Artist in Residence for 2025.

In June I'll be off to live at Marchmont House in the Scottish Boarders for a month to dedicate myself solely to.... ART!

You can read my submission below to find out what i'll be up to and the project that was awarded:

My goal for the residency is to dedicate time to research and development, expanding my practice at the intersection of art, ecology, and social anthropology. My background in surgical art—particularly robotic surgery—heightened my sensitivity to structure, fragility, and intervention in organic forms. Over time, my focus has shifted to broader relationships between humans and ecosystems, and the ways different cultures navigate these. I have been fortunate to work with botanic gardens and organisations to create botanical artworks, however I am a research-based artist and feel I have not had the opportunity to pursue this fully yet within the natural world. The residency would provide this opportunity.

As an artist and researcher, I have long been interested in researching Walled Gardens and the people who work in them. I find them fascinating as spaces that exist at the intersection of human intervention and natural processes, where nature is curated, shaped, and enclosed — manifestations of our desire to impose order on the organic and unpredictable. In many ways walled gardens serve as analogies for humanity’s broader relationship with the natural world. They embody the tension between cultivation and wildness, between control and surrender. This residency would provide a unique opportunity to explore these themes, raising essential questions about how we define and interact with nature.

I aim to investigate through drawing, reading, and social inquiry how walled gardens reflect cultural ideas of control, ownership, and stewardship, examining their historical, social, and ecological significance. I am particularly interested in how language shapes our perceptions of cultivated and "wild" spaces—how terms like "invasive" or "native" reflect deeper cultural narratives about belonging and exclusion, and I would love to run an event along these lines.

If given the residency, the residency itself will only account for one part of the project; first, in the month leading up I will continue my research into walled gardens generally and the history of gardens; second, during the residency I will spend time in the gardens, talking to gardeners and other artists and visitors, creating drawings and notes; third, I will take all that I have experienced and use it to create new work.

This residency would be a pivotal moment for my career in so many ways; but most importantly by providing time, which is so hard to come by and so important for any research or art, alongside invaluable opportunities to collaborate with other artists and garden workers, and the connection to the Hugo Burge Foundation, a highly respected organisation, would offer significant professional development and visibility.

I believe there is so much we can learn from gardens, and from the people who tend the soil. One of my heroes Robin Wall Kimmerer shares the story of sweetgrass, a sacred plant in many indigenous cultures. Sweetgrass thrives when it is cared for and harvested thoughtfully, but “If we ignore it, it will go away.” A living metaphor for how human interaction with the natural world can be mutually beneficial rather than destructive.

https://www.hugoburgefoundation.org/