We are so pleased to be able to announce artists Sally Price and Minnie Scott have received awards from Art Walk Weekends to create new work for the festival.

Both artists will be exhibiting in our Art in Shops strand of this year’s Art Walk Weekends festival open 5-6 and 12-13 September.

Sally Price exhibits at The Portobello Bookshop

Sally Price is an Edinburgh-based multidisciplinary visual artist whose work is driven by immersion in process, curiosity around material physicality, and fascination with tactility and viscerality. Exploration of tension, catharsis and repetition, and working generatively and sustainably, are core to her practice. Mental and physical health experiences inform her work; she considers control, relinquishment, the ordered, the organic and the incidental. She engages in an ongoing conversation between her will and that of the material as she attempts to speak to the body, the landscape, and the environment through material gesture and manipulation. Lately she has started exploring her diabetes data as visual and conceptual inspiration, noticing parallels with common motifs in her work and the natural landscape.

Minnie Scott exhibits at Home Sales & Lettings, Portobello

Minnie Scott is a Willowbrae-based artist. Finding inspiration in film and found images, she makes work thinking about storytelling, fantasy and nostalgia. One of her abiding interests is how different kinds of imagery and media teach us to look, particularly at women. Recent work responds to pre-1920 silent films, relishing the sense of play and possibility in this new medium. She’s drawn to moving image for many reasons: the challenge keeping some feeling of movement in a static drawing; finding mark-making equivalents for the shimmer of film; the sense of pouncing on the still that says everything about a character or a relationship; conversely, the way storytelling can be elusive, so it’s up to the viewer to add the before and after; thinking about a world that’s made of light, the flickering of the flicks.

The full Art Walk Weekends programme will be available online at the end of July.

Opening Launch: Thu 3 September, 6.30-8.30pm

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We’ve moved! We are excited to say that after a community buyout and months of diligent work from Action Porty and their team of volunteers, we have been able to relocate to the old Police Station (@actionstationporty) on Portobello High Street. We are so excited to watch how the community around this building will grow, and to finally have a permanent physical presence in the Portobello community. 

We are currently making the transition to charitable status. Art Walk Projects was founded as a community interest company in 2015, but last year we began working to move to SCIO status to better reflect the direction in which the organisation is growing. 

We hope to share more about these changes as our activities develop.

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Portobello Seed Share supports sustainable growing developing a seed bank of local resilient seed to be saved and shared.

We invite you to browse, borrow or add open pollinated seed to the new Seed Share located in Portobello Library.

This seed project comes through Remedy, a coastal medicinal plant photo-arts project working with Access to Industry, artist Zoe Hamill and Herbal Scotland led by Art Walk Projects in 2026.

Upcoming Events;

Tues 14 April, 2pm-3pm: Childrens’ drop-in (ages 6-10 years): Join us in making cyanotypes from locally collected plants with artist Zoe Hamill.

Weds 22 April, 6.30pm-7.45pm: Portobello Seed Swap at Portobello Library. Join us to to launch the new Portobello Seed Share project, exchange seeds, and hear from Herbal Scotland about medicinal plants. Tickets available from Portobello Library.

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We are currently looking to grow our Festival Organising Committee with 2-3 new volunteers joining us to help deliver this year’s Art Walk Weekends event.  We operate as a small team of committed local people, many of whom are local artists who have been involved since our start more than 10 years ago. We are now seeking new members to join us to help bring together our festival, under the governance of Art Walk Projects, organisational producers of the event. 

As we transition to the new structure of Art Walk Weekends (after 10 years as Art Walk Porty), it presents an exciting time to join the committee, to help shape and take forward the event.

We’re looking for

Enthusiastic, well organised, good communicators for hands-on help with organising and promoting the different elements of the event involving local artists, local shops & businesses, and community spaces around Portobello and Joppa.

You don’t have to have any direct experience of working or volunteering in arts or festivals, but an interest in the local creative community would be beneficial. 

You’ll be expected to:

Live locally in Portobello or nearby

Attend regular meetings, usually in region of 8-10 per year, with greater frequency from March to September

Have time available while the festival takes place (usually the first two weekends of September).

Interested in getting involved?

Please complete our short form by 31 March. We’d love to hear about your interest in joining the committee and what you feel you would bring, along with any experience you might have.

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Friday 13 March

1200h-1300h  The Portobello Moonlight Revue! featuring Big Stew’s Tidal Circus and Marine Marvels with Portobello High School pupils, facilitated by visual theatre artist Gretchen Maynard-Hahn.
Leaves from Portobello High School at 1200h, arriving to Portobello Promenade by 1300h.

1200h-1530h  Tide & Seek An afternoon of diverse installations displayed across the beach, playing on the theme of Art Walk Porty’s Showground programme, created by third year Edinburgh College of Art students.
1400h Artist-led walk commencing from Nobles Amusements (by Beach Lane entrance).

Saturday 14 March

1400h-1530h Remedy Seed project and small publication launch coming through community photo-arts project with participants from Access to Industry, facilitated by artist Zoe Hamill. A new Portobello Seed Share to be located at Portobello Library will also be launched, with cyanotype demo from Zoe Hamill, and medicinal plant ecology walk and talk from Herbal Scotland.
Starts from Portobello Library at 1400h.

With thanks to partners Access to Industry,  Edinburgh College of Art, Herbal Scotland, Portobello High School, and Portobello Library in realising these projects.

Supported by funding from Creative Scotland, City of Edinburgh Council Event Fund and National Lottery Awards for All.

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Art Walk Porty is changing to Art Walk Weekends continuing annually in September, and we introduce a new environmental coastal biennial arts festival FORECAST, to commence from May 2027.

These decisions have been taken to bring added space and visibility to each side of our regular programme, involving our year-round environmental arts focussed work and that of Portobello’s creative community. Over recent years it has become clear how situating our activity around two separate events will mean we are able to deliver cohesive programmes that can best serve our audiences and the participating artists with whom we work. We hope that this restructuring will help to grow each aspect of our programme, whilst collectively bringing value to art in public spaces around Edinburgh’s coast.

FORECAST will take place mid-May 2027 and will focus around outcomes from our new round of residencies The Held Sea, due to be announced in April 2026.

Art Walk Weekends (5-6 + 12-13 September 2026) will centre around an open exhibition of Portobello’s local creative community, arranged around four walking routes of the local neighbourhood. Artists will exhibit works in homes, shops, studios and community spaces over the two weekends.

We will announce further details about Art Walk Weekends shortly, with a new online submission process open from 2-31 March.

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We have chosen to join this campaign in solidarity with the people of Palestine, and in line with our organisation’s ethos, policies and values. Formally pledging our support for PACBI underlines a way of working that Art Walk Projects has always upheld, but makes explicit our support for Palestine. 

Art Walk Projects is built on the belief in the power of art to bring people together, to uplift unheard voices, and to empower communities towards change. We reject the use of culture to whitewash the genocide being perpetrated by Israel. 

For us, informed by BDS guidelines, this means we commit to the following:

• We will not work with Israeli cultural organisations, or any project/individual sponsored or funded by the Israeli state, complicit Israeli institutions or the Israeli Embassy. 
• We will not have any involvement with normalisation projects or organisations/individuals that seek to present a ‘both sides’ narrative.
• Further actions will include developing an ethical fundraising policy, and working with Palestinian artists in our future programming. 

We wish to thank Art Workers for Palestine Scotland for their tireless work in continuing to uphold Palestinian rights.

Further information:
https://www.bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines
https://www.bdsmovement.net/cultural-boycott

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We are delighted to have been able to commission Edinburgh based writer Tom Jeffreys to create this new article interweaving the three different artist projects as part of Deluge.

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It is with immense pleasure we announce that we have been successful in our application for Creative Scotland’s Multi Year Funding for 2025-28. We feel so incredibly proud to be one of the 141 organisations, who for the first time, have become part of Creative Scotland’s Multi Year Funding Portfolio.

This news marks a significant moment for us, coming at the same time as our ten year anniversary since forming. We are so delighted for the recognition it brings to our very small team, who have worked tirelessly over the years to build and develop our organisation. We wish to thank every one of you who has been involved since 2015 behind the scenes and through our programme, the artists involved, and participating audiences who have helped shape and further our vision, all of whom this would not be possible without.

We are very excited about the possibilities this fund can now bring for climate and place-centred social arts, situated in and around Portobello, across coastal Edinburgh and beyond, whilst providing vital stability to our organisation and the chance to grow our staff team.

We look forward to developing our programme around the health of place and the intersecting of coastal communities that will be central components across this new 3-year programme. 

Rosy Naylor
Curator & Founder

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Journey Lines brought together discussion around path making and place making, to consider tourism and access along our coast lines. Discussing how we consider the role of tourism in making (or breaking) places, Zeiske gave an illustrated talk about her long-distance 700 mile walk Slow Coast 500 commissioned by Art Walk Projects.

In conversation with anthropologist Tim Ingold, we heard about his ideas of the Coastline, discussing socio-ecological approaches to anthropology, drawing connections with walking, weaving, and storytelling, to consider the impacts on the environment and community for path and place-making.

Chaired by Ben Twist (Director, Creative Carbon Scotland), the event also bring together representatives from different coastal path locations on the North Sea coast, as well as tourism and place making strategies.

Image: Alice Mainstone

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