KEENING: The Song of the Stranding

Visual Artist

Sam is a landscape artist based on the Isle of Harris, with work represented in galleries across the UK. Her practice explores our deep connection to the land, using art as a bridge between nature, culture, and science. Beyond creating evocative landscapes, she is evolving her work to contribute meaningfully to environmental awareness, citizen science, and public engagement.

Sam’s projects are designed to be participatory—bringing people into the landscape to learn, collaborate, and share knowledge. She integrates fieldwork with artistic expression, drawing on local culture and ecological insights to illuminate both the beauty and the challenges facing our natural world.

A committed advocate for art’s role in environmental discourse, Sam is a Co-Founder of the Wilderness Art Collective and an ambassador for the Wilderness Foundation UK. Her work has been featured in major exhibitions, art fairs, and media outlets, and she frequently collaborates with scientists and conservationists to inspire deeper connections with the wild.

Landscape Painting Website

Singer

Nerea Bello is a Basque singer/performer and jewellery maker based in Scotland who moves seamlessly between solo, collaborative and theatre work. Nerea is passionate about rediscovering forgotten sounds and unearthing old ways of singing, celebrating the sound of raw, unadulterated voices that can fearlessly express vulnerability and emotion. She has a similar approach to her jewellery making, bringing forgotten and discarded materials to her jewellery and object creation. Nerea is happiest when working in collaboration.

Website

Musician, Researcher, Composer

Based in Glasgow, Scotland, Alex is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh), where his research is focused on ethical questions arising from the human use of the sounds of other animals for aesthetic or scientific purposes.

His interdisciplinary PhD, Cetacean Citations, combined practice-led research from the perspectives of ecomusicology and zoömusicology with bioacoustical studies on humpback whale song. He has published on animal culture, biomusicology, and ecomusicology, and teaches on undergraduate music courses at the University of St Andrews and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Alex regularly plays clarinet and bass clarinet with Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Collective Endeavours, and Ensemble Thing. His compositions have been performed by Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Sequoia, and St Andrews Chamber Orchestra, and featured in ‘The Musical Animal’, broadcast in 2022 in Canada by the CBC. A collaboration with Katherine Wren (Nordic Viola) inspired by Lesley Harrison’s poem, CETACEA was praised by The Wire for its “keening lines of whale song; a beautiful study”.

Website

Musician

Katherine Wren founded Nordic Viola in 2016 to explore the relationship between
contemporary and traditional music of the Far North. The islands of the North Atlantic share musical and cultural connections and Katherine shares contemporary reflections, traditional melodies and personal testimonies that are shaped by her experience of travelling through these vast northern landscapes.

Over the last few years, Katherine has increasingly worked as an improviser and cocreator with a range of composers. Most recently she recorded an album, On A Wing and A Prayer - Reflections on Deeside's Changing Habitats with music created alongside composers Pete and Joe Stollery. This is due for release on 6th Feb 2025. She was also commissioned alongside Shetland composer and improviser Renzo Spiteri and Greenlandic composer Arnannguaq Gerstrøm to produce "Arctic Edgelands" for Nordic Music Days in Glasgow.

In Jan 2025 Katherine Wren returned to Iceland to improvise and perform with Scottish/Icelandic composer Charles Ross. The pair have previously performed in Mengi, Reykjavik and Egilsstaðir, East Iceland. Katherine has previously worked alongside Irish composer Karen Power, performing her "Sonic Cradle" as part of Sound Festival 2021.

Music inspired by the environment has run as a thread through Nordic Viola's work since its inception. Much of the influence for her improvisations comes from her deep connection to the landscape, often travelling by bike and foot. Her project "On A Wing and A Prayer" is ongoing and now includes a series of sound/art workshops focusing on changing habitats with local communities.

Katherine is acutely aware of how climate change is affecting Far North habitats, noticing the decrease in summer sea ice since she first visited Greenland in 2015 and witnessing humankind's increasingly heavy footfall in the Northern Isles. As awareness of and engagement with the climate crisis grows, she is keen to expand Nordic Viola's repertoire through conversation, improvisation and performance with composers who live or work close to endangered habitats.

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Dance Artist, Choreographer

Aya is a Glasgow-based independent dance artist. She often teaches, performs and choreographs on various companies and communities.

Born in Japan, she began ballet training at an early age to help her pigeon toes for walking. She found her passion in dance and trained at Showa Music and Art College (Tokyo). She then relocated to the UK and continued her training at Rambert School and Chichester University for MA.

She performed with various artists/companies such as Yael Flexer, Rosemary Lee, Charlie Morrissey, Gecko Theatre and Scottish Dance Theatre. She is a member of Collective Endeavours and practices improvisation performance.

At the heart of her work is inclusion. Between 2019-2023, she was leading Barrowland Ballet’s intergenerational company Wolf Pack. She has worked with various inclusive companies and communities such as Anjali, Indepen-Dance, Stop Gap and Paragon. Aya also works as a movement director for Tricky Hat Production, helping brilliant life stories shine on stage. She teaches inclusive workshops internationally.

She is a lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and teaches weekly professional classes hosted by The Work Room which she dedicates to the dance community in Glasgow.

She often works with galleries such as Tate, V&A Museum of Childhood and Tramway, to lead education workshops and participatory performances. She also enjoys creating outdoor and site-specific work and exploring the possibility of movement in public places. Her works have been presented in the UK and abroad at locations including The Place, Paralympics 2012 torch relay ceremony, Cairo, Madrid, Tokyo, Ofunato (Japan), Mexico and various places in Scotland.

Website