Art Road Trip Residency

(crop) John Constable, 1776 – 1837, The Cornfield (1826). Presented by subscribers, including Wordsworth, Faraday and Sir William Beechey, 1837 © The National Gallery, London.
(crop) John Constable, 1776 – 1837, The Cornfield (1826). Presented by subscribers, including Wordsworth, Faraday and Sir William Beechey, 1837 © The National Gallery, London.
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In 2024, Huntly was just one of two Scottish locations welcoming Art Road Trip, part of the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary celebrations. Art Road Trip was a mobile art studio that toured the UK in 2024, bringing an insight into the National Gallery to 24 different communities across 18 towns and cities, including Huntly. The National Gallery is home to the national collection of Western European paintings from the 13th to the 19th century and is located on Trafalgar Square in London.

Over 6 months, we worked with writer, artist and researcher Natasha Thembiso Ruwona to develop a programme for Art Road Trip that explored and built connections between the National Gallery’s collections and the North-East of Scotland. Using the National Gallery's collection as a starting point, we proposed the following questions to guide the programme:

Who is visible and who is rendered invisible within the landscape?

What do memory and fiction tell us about land and landscape?

How might our understandings of time shift to cultivate a deeper relationship of place?

These questions were explored throughout the Art Road Trip programme, including in two walks developed collaboratively by Natasha with Huntly-based artist Fi Thomson. Inviting participants to practice walking as holistic process to engage with the landscape, the walks used walking as a means to gather, to seek kinship and uncover spatial identities in time and place. Both walks considered personal and collective relationships to time through memory, ecological, queer and black forms of making and holding time. Through these guided walks and activities we created alternative ways of being with time through drawing, writing and somatic exercises, prompting questions about our spatial and temporal relations, and creating the space to (re)imagine possible landscapes.

Find out more about each walk here: Experiments in Time with Natasha Ruwona and Meditations on the Left Hand of Darkness with Fi Thomson.