John Muir’s Birthplace, Dunbar, EH42 1JJ,
17th July – 27 September 2026
Exhibition open Wednesday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm, Sundays 1 – 5pm
FLOW -connecting landscape and communities through creativity
From a distance it might seem that East Lammermuir’s gently rolling landscape, between the hills and the sea, forms one of our wild places. Look more closely and you will realise that it is mostly an ecologically degraded landscape, with fragmented habitats, declining biodiversity and little resilience in the face of climate change. The coastal burns provide the main semi-natural links but are themselves constrained, with barriers to fish migration and limited room to function ecologically or hydrologically in a natural way. Today there is new pressure from massive renewable energy development and associated grid infrastructure that is stretching the landscape’s capacity to absorb the cumulative impacts.
The FLOW programme of workshops, a collaboration with North Light Arts, aimed to connect people more deeply with this landscape and start to direct our creativity to help in reviving and restoring this environment. Working with artist, educator and forager Katie Fowlie, we involved people aged from 7 to 97 in exploring and responding to the environs of the Spott Burn in a spirit of creativity.
Using natural materials, we have created artworks that illustrate our desire to connect with earth and elements and the biodiversity that can thrive in the right conditions. Katie helped us to explore new media and possibilities. Discovering the tradition of Dorodango, we transformed clay and pigments into spheres like tiny planets. Our first experiments with plant based photography created magical images of astonishing delicacy and colour. Then we turned our hands to printing on streamer like scrolls of Japanese paper – going out into the field, taking impressions of plants, rocks, tree bark, lichens. We were unstoppable. Casting natural objects in plaster gave unexpected outcomes and lastly we made Mosslings – tiny totems to express our cares , concerns, hopes and dreams into the natural world.
It has been a joyful experience for all who participated, and we hope visitors to the exhibition will share our sense of wonder and passion to care for the natural world.
