VESSEL connects Portobello’s coastal ecologies with global questions relating to water, fracture and care in response to the climate crisis. Embracing a wide range of subjects, including collective consumption, climate-induced migration, aridity and drought, tourism, waste processing and more, the nine artists and contributors, working across a range of geographies (including one international digital residency) develop a series of interweaving projects.

Artists: Henna Asikainen, Jonathan Baxter, Huniti Goldox, Tonya McMullan, Murray Morrant, Jenny Pope, Lucas Priest, Vira Putri, Claudia Zeiske. 

Writers: Isabel Perez-Ramos, Alycia Pirmohamed, Maria Sledmere (commissioned in partnership with MAP Magazine). 

With introductory essays from project curator, Rosy Naylor and editor, Tom Jeffreys.

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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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The work features contemporary reenactments of a water clock – a time-keeping technique from ancient times that relies on the fall and flow of water through a vessel. It critically engages with colonial perspectives and scale, examining how territorial control is exerted through human-made structures like time zones, dammed rivers, and aridity lines. It provokes reflection on scientific and indigenous forms of knowledge, as well as the fates of unmeasurable objects, subjects and relations within the natural world.

For the exhibition for the Vessel program at mote102 (20-27 September) the viewers are invited into an immersive video installation including a video of a digitally constructed water clock model and a video manual which takes the viewer along diverse landscapes. By immersing viewers in a narrative woven by the intertwined entities of water, stones, trees, and birds, the work offers a shift towards an elastic territory that transcends the traditional boundaries of time. Through it HUNITI GOLDOX seeks to contemplate diverse methods of world-building that prioritize the interconnectedness of elemental forces, in contrast to the industrialized and accumulative doctrines that have prevailed.

HUNITI GOLDOX (Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox) is an artist collective whose work is shaped by contextual examinations of geopolitical realities, marginalised oral histories and mythologies. They started their engagement with mutant narratives through contextual research on a buried water stream in the centre of Amman, Jordan which then extended to the swamp lands and coast of Tunis, Tunisia, an artificial lake in Leipzig, Germany, urban development projects around Tirana River, Albania and the Vistula River in Poland.

Their work has been exhibited and screened across Jordan at Darat Al Funun, The MMAG Foundation, The Jordan National Gallery and Goethe Institute in Amman as well as at SomoS Art House, Berlin, D21, Leipzig, Sheffield Film Festival, TBA21-Academy, Venice, Tirana Art Lab, Albania, Manifesta 14 in Kosovo and Hauser & Wirth Menorca.

Images: Sally Jubb Photography 

LIST OF WORKS

September 2023 during Art Walk Porty Extended:
VESSEL Group Exhibition, mote102 Ferry Rd Leith (immersive video installation)

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Through collective casting workshops on the beach in Portobello to produce transient vessels, and mixed media investigations, Murray explores the dynamic interplay between architecture, human nature, and ever-changing landscapes.

Murray Morrant Based in Glasgow, Murray’s work is influenced by his interest in architecture and the built environment. Through a narrative-based approach, his work often takes an anthropological approach, exploring the human desire to shape and reshape landscapes into territories over time. The idea of environments being in constant flux is a common theme throughout his creative practice.

Murray studied architecture at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 2021. His work, ‘Against Aseptic Corporeality,’ which reimagines a gallery for wastewater, has been exhibited in the Desired Spaces Exhibition (2020) and featured in Koozarch magazine. Murray has since worked for architecture studios in Denmark, London, and Glasgow.

Above images from Sand Making Vessel Workshop and Pop Up Exhibition, Portobello Beach (September 2023)

The workshop involved making objects in the style of sandcastles,
encouraging learning and creative thinking through play. A lightweight
cubicle on the beach created a pop-up exhibition; the four walls of the cubicle providing the walls to display polaroid camera images of the made vessels which were later taken by the rising tide.

Murray provided a selection of forms to be used in the same way a bucket is used for making sandcastles. Participants mixed and matched these forms to experiment and create their own sandcastle-like sculptures, taking the shape of pipework, toilets, and drains. These are elements that are usually invisible and reserved for individual use, but here, they will be put on display and made by a collective group of people.

Accompanying works as part of Vessel group exhibition, Art Walk Hub (September 2023)

Toilet 1 2023 using materials collected from the Figgate Burn Portobello
Booklet including map of Portobello sewer, surface water and water pipes & supported texts

LIST OF WORKS & EVENTS

September 2023 during Art Walk Porty:
VESSEL Group Exhibition, Art Walk Hub Portobello High Street
Sand making VESSEL workshop, Portobello Beach

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Vira Putri’s work draws upon jamu, the Indonesian traditional healing practice which the artist likens to cooking. The vessel itself contains Beras kencur, a jamu tonic made with rice, lesser galangal and water. It is used to cure fatigue and rheumatic symptoms, which not only speaks to the collective fatigue of humanity, but also to the strained resources that our non-symbiotic societies have cultivated.

Vira led two jamu-making workshops inviting participants to join in with making kunyit asem, a general tonic comprised of turmeric, tamarind, and palm sugar used to ease inflammation and increase overall immunity.

Images: Christopher Counihan

Images: Ellie J McMaster

Vira Putri is an interdisciplinary artist based in Edinburgh. She investigates the cultural significance of ingredients through the traditional Indonesian practice of jamu. Exploring the ritualistic movements within domestic spaces, she hopes to blur the lines between the kitchen and the artist’s studio, leading her to question the prescriptive authority of (that) a recipe (has over ingredients as individual objects) as an inherited form of knowledge. Putri’s practice resituates the ingredient as a curative entity.

Past works include In Dialogue: Visual Recipes, shown at Tenderfoot, Edinburgh Palette (2021); She is My Vessel I am Hers, an expanded painting installation at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) (2021); and Vitamin T at MAFAF*CKERS, ECA (2020). Putri also has a supperclub with Dienu Prihartadi called studio roedjak that hosts intimate dinners of curated Indonesian dishes.

LIST OF WORKS

September 2023 during Art Walk Porty:
VESSEL Group Exhibition, Art Walk Hub Portobello
Jamu Making Workshops, Portobello Promenade & Art Walk Hub

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Throughout the walk, Zeiske uses existing routes and explores new ones. Along the way, she carries an orange tablecloth the colour of an OS ‘Explorer’ map, using it as a picnic blanket to encourage conversation. Step by step and stitch by stitch, Zeiske is embroidering it along the long way to the Scottish-English border, questioning the role and impacts of tourism today. Zeiske is also sending a daily postcard home to Art Walk Projects in Portobello.

As part of the 2023 Art Walk Porty Festival visitors met Claudia at Cramond Causeway joining her for the final stretch of the walk to Portobello, followed by a discussion at the Art Walk Hub to view her exhibition.

Claudia also led a workshop based on the orange tablecloth that she has carried throughout her coastal walk from Thurso and embroidered daily. Participants were given a piece of orange cloth on which to embroider a path of importance to them.

Claudia Zeiske is a walking curator, whose interest lies in path-making as a cultural practice. With friendship at heart, her walks combine a desire for a slower pace of life with socio-politically and environmentally sensitive issues. For more than a decade, her walking art projects have varied from short to long, in her vicinity or further afield, connecting places, communities and people along the way. Her walking prose promotes thinking aloud.

Projects include: Walking Lunches (2010-ongoing a play on corporate working lunches; Home to Home (2017), a Brexit-stimulated 1,800-mile walk from the artist’s home in Huntly, Aberdeenshire to her childhood home in Bavaria, Germany; Slow Marathons (2012-ongoing), annual themed group walks, questioning the competitive nature of marathons; and From Mountain to Sea (2022), a 150-mile walk across Aberdeenshire to mark the Covid period.

Embroidery Workshop with Claudia Zeiske (September 2023) – Photo: Ellie J McMaster

LIST OF WORKS & EVENTS

July 2023 Public walk with participants from Timespan, Helmsdale
August 2023 Public walk with participants from Forgan Art Centre (Carnoustie to St Andrews)

September 2023 during Art Walk Porty:
VESSEL Group Exhibition, Art Walk Hub Portobello High Street
VESSEL Group Exhibition, mote102 Ferry Rd Leith

Slow Coast 500 Welcome to Portobello – participatory walk Cramond to Portobello, followed by in-conversation at Art Walk Hub
Tablecloth Embroidery workshop, Art Walk Hub

November 2023:
Claudia Zeiske talk hosted by Walk. Listen. Create – in conversation with Andrew Stuck, founder of the Museum of Walking

February 2024:
Journey Lines: Making and Breaking Places – talk and discussion with Tim Ingold (anthropologist) and Ben Twist (Director, Creative Carbon Scotland).
St Mark’s Church, Portobello

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.

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 brought together representatives from different coastal path locations on the North Sea coast, as well as tourism and place making strategies.

View recording here
Images: Alice Mainstone

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For Art Walk Porty, McMullan is collaborating with Restalrig-based community group, The Ripple Project, looking at methods of rainwater collection and community growing to create a scented water-collection sculpture. Made from discarded plastic and organic material, this work is informed by McMullan’s interest in interactions between humans and insects, as well as the unique scent and growth patterns of tomato plants.

Top image: Installation at mote102 (Art Walk Extended, September 2023)
Photo: Sally Jubb Photography

Images from Water Collection Device Workshop at Craigentinny Community Garden (Photos: Ellie J McMaster)

Tonya McMullan situates her work amidst communities using long-term engagement to make context-specific, process-based, participatory and performative installations that foreground ecological concerns. McMullan has immersed herself in the world of insects for several years: ongoing projects with beekeeping, urban agriculture and pollinators have developed into explorations of our sensory and extra-sensory connections.

Past projects include Crude Floral (2022), a series of scent explorations with Art Walk Projects; There is something in the æther (2021), a scent and hand sanitiser created for TULCA festival in Galway to encourage people to recollect smell memories and consider relationships with the environment past present and future; and The Lure of Tomorrow’s Harvests (2020), an installation commissioned by Talbot Rice Gallery comprising an archive of Edinburgh honey collected during lockdown.

Images from Water Collection Device Workshop with The Ripple Project (August 2023).

Bottom image: Guided tour to Seafield Water Treatment Plant (September 2023).
Photos: Tonya McMullan and Rosy Naylor

LIST OF WORKS

July-August 2023 Workshops with The Ripple Project, Craigentinny
September 2023 during Art Walk Porty:
VESSEL Group Exhibition, Art Walk Hub Portobello
VESSEL Group Exhibition, mote102 Ferry Rd Leith
Rainwater Collection Workshop, Craigentinny Community Garden
Seafield Water Treatment Plant Drawing Tour
Conversing with Tomatoes Event with wild foods forager Judith Lamb

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In Karelia, archaeologists once found a child buried on the wing of a swan. Developing this image and its wider resonances, Wing Cradle incorporates harnesses from a horse involved in war between Finland and Russia as well as a feathered structure made by the artist’s mother, Salame Hökkä, and aunt, Terttu Hökkä, identical twins and artisan textile workers. The structure incorporates thousands of white feathers (by-products from the manufacturing of down jackets and duvets), hand-stitched onto cotton to create a talisman of protection and love.

Wing Cradle is a collaborative piece installed inside Portobello’s disused bottle kiln during Art Walk Porty 2023.
Soundscape: composer, multi-instrumentalist Erland Cooper
Lived experience testimonies: Zainah Adnan

The installation also takes place as part of Scottish Archaeology Month

Dr Henna Asikainen is a multidisciplinary, socially engaged artist, whose work questions human relationships with nature, and the complex social and ecological issues that emerge. Many of Asikainen’s recent projects have been built around communal experiences within different landscapes and have examined issues including migration, climate justice and unequal access to nature. Her work consistently advocates for a philosophy of friendship and radical hospitality.

Asikainen has exhibited widely and undertaken numerous residencies both nationally and internationally. Her most recent projects include Future Pasts at Gallery North, Newcastle (2023); Delicate Shuttle, Communities and Change exhibition at Newcastle Contemporary Art as part of the Memory Studies Association conference (2023); and Omens at BALTIC 39, Newcastle (2020). Originally from North Karelia, Finland, Henna now lives in Newcastle, UK.

Zainah Adnan is a creative individual, survivor, alternative medicine specialist and a single mother from Yemen.  Zainah and her son are currently seeking asylum.  Zainah met Henna while she was housed in a hotel in Newcastle. 

Erland Cooper is a Scottish, composer, produçer & multi-instrumentalist originally from Orkney. As a solo artist, he has released four acclaimed studio albums, with 4 additional companion LPs & multiple EPs, including a trilogy of work inspired by his childhood home, as well as themes of nature, people, place & time. His work combines field recordings with traditional orchestration & contemporary electronic elements.

LIST OF WORKS

September 2023 during Art Walk Porty:
Installation, Portobello Kilns, Bridge Street –
soundscape: composer, multi-instrumentalist Erland Cooper
lived experience testimonies: Zainah Adnan (Yemen)
Artist Talk by Henna Asikainen

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Walking from mouth to source along three adjoining burns: Figgate, Braid and Bonaly, these walks took their inspiration from the way of water – its flow and healing powers – and the poetry to be found in the name Braid Burn:

Burn (landform): 

Large stream or small river

Braid (transitive verb):

To make from braids
To form (three or more strands) into a braid
To mix and intermingle; to braid fact with fiction

Burn (intransitive verb):

To contain a fire
To produce or undergo discomfort or pain
To yearn ardently; burning to tell the storyThe story we’ll be telling, or rather, the story we’ll be walking, concerns our collective sense of what it means to live within a climate and ecological crisis, and how walking a watercourse might enable us to live that question now with rejuvenated purpose and joy.  

Questions we asked included the following: in a time of climate and ecological crisis what qualities, human and more-than-human, might we braid to ensure our planetary survival? What can we learn from walking this particular watercourse? Why walk from mouth to source: upstream and in search of something we may never find?

Over the course of four walks and two additional workshops we explored these questions, and more, through walking, drawing, poetry, and conversation. Integral to the project was the process of walking upstream into mystery, uncertainty and doubt; qualities we may need to cultivate if we wish to respond creatively to the climate and ecological crisis and the alternative futures it gives rise to. Participants were encouraged to bring their own resources to our collective endeavour: a singer brings their voice, a photographer their camera, an ecologist their know-how.

The walks were guided by our encounter with water, curated by Jonathan Baxter (artist-curator), with contributions from Helen Boden (writer and workshop leader), Sarah Gittins (visual artist and workshop leader), and James Spence (haiku poet).

During Art Walk Porty 2023 Vessel programme participants contributed through two exhibitions (Art Walk Hub and Porty Light Box) together with poetry and conversation inspired by walking the Braid Burn Watercourse, with readings by Helen Boden, James Spence, and other walkers. Themes explored subjects of climate change, ecology, flow, structure and hope.

In September 2025 A publication was produced published by Art Walk Press and launched at the 2025 Art Walk Porty Festival. Copies are now available for sale through this website.

Supported by project funding from Paths for All and National Lottery Awards for All.

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During LUCAS PRIEST’S residency with Art Walk Projects’ ‘Climate Cafe’ the School will become an expanded walking forum featuring contributions from artists Iman Tajik and Johanna Koen. Drawing from the writings and research of Elena Biserna we will collectively meander through coastal sites of change and dereliction, exploring walking scores as tools for awareness in both a literal and politicized sense.

Through walking routes, discussions and psychogeographic games, we have been investigating the sociocultural, ecological and economic implications of water systems in Edinburgh’s coastal cityscape. Our research has no empirical results; only the passing conversations held between participants, and the experiences gained by actually doing the scores.

The School of Pedestrian Culture is a pseudo-institution for the ‘play testing’ of psychogeographic games aimed at disorienting how we encounter space and place across Scotland’s central belt. The School has a particular focus on exploring, encountering and drifting through sites of change, community resilience and capitalist expansion. 

The School emerged from the sense of a lack of a collective pedagogy at the Edinburgh College of Art following the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally existing as the ‘Diversionists’, the group later became known as the School of Pedestrian Culture, a fictional department at ECA. Now part walking forum, part art collective, part art school, the SoPC interweaves walking and talking with local politics, community resilience, friendships and art!

This project forms the first part of Art Walk Projects’ newly formed ‘Climate Cafe’; a series of walking events that provide informal, inclusive spaces for everyone to join in conversation and get involved, that connect with climate action locally and further afield. 

Supported by funding from The National Lottery Awards for All & Creative Scotland, the ‘Climate Cafe’ will involve a series of events working with artists and ecologists from May-Dec 2023

Images from public walk during Art Walk Porty 2023 Vessel programme and accompanying exhibition at Art Walk Hub. Images: Ellie J McMaster

LIST OF WORKS

May to Sept 2023 A series of monthly artist-led walks around Portobello
September during Art Walk Porty:
VESSEL Group Exhibition, Art Walk Hub Portobello
Scored Group Walk, with public participants

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Christina Riley’s latest work brings this unseen activity to the surface, asking what life looks like to those who live underwater.

Her work compares the weighty, sharp and unwieldy gear of the scallop dredge with its chain mail “belly bag” to the delicate marine bodies underwater. Riley has engaged with local marine scientists and conservationists to create underwater photographs of affected locations. These images show not only the impacts of dredging but also the positive solutions being enacted by communities.

Christina Riley is an interdisciplinary artist based on the west coast of Scotland, who explores connections between art and science with a focus on the sea and inshore habitats. Living next to the water and infatuated by the endless unknowns of life on earth, Riley seeks underwater and multi-species perspectives as a means of exploring the idea that something does not need to be understood in order to be cared for, but it does need to be experienced, somehow. 

Drawn by an instinctive desire to hold, touch, collect, gather and share, her practice involves books and storytelling as well as natural and man-made objects. She is inspired by the power of the individual within a collective, the significance of the seemingly insignificant, and how the part becomes the whole. 

Photography: Sally Jubb

LIST OF WORKS

September 2023 during Art Walk Porty:
Installation, Portobello Beach and Pipe Street Toilets (outside walls)
Artist Talk by Christina Riley

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Made from woven willow and bamboo and lined with clothing donated by local residents, the vessel evokes the possibility of navigating hope in uncertain times. The work encourages conversations around the climate emergency and Portobello’s complex connections with the sea. Following a series of workshops, in which participants can create a common ‘survival kit’, the project culminates with a watery celebration event, launching the vessel with a swim along the shore.

Top image: Coracle Launch (2023) – Photo: Jon Davey

Coracle Launch & Watery Event at Portobello Beach (September 2023)- Photos: Ellie J McMaster
Videography: Rachel McBrinn

Jenny Pope is a sculptor who creates collections of tools from discarded objects to explore psychological change. Her work layers together different components, each with their own past functions and applications, in order to create non-linear narratives and evoke the intangible ways in which we make decisions in response to change and uncertainty. In particular, her work explores anxieties around the climate crisis, questioning the possibilities of hope and perceptions of survival.

She trained at Edinburgh College of Art and exhibits widely in the UK. She has undertaken residencies with Art Walk Porty and commissions with Scottish Society of Artists (SSA). She is also on the council of the SSA, a member of Royal British Society of Sculptors, and is involved in mentoring and coaching artists.

Installation at mote102 (Art Walk Extended, September 2023)- Photo: Sally Jubb

LIST OF WORKS

August 2023 Survival Kit Workshops, Portobello
September 2023 during Art Walk Porty:
VESSEL Group Exhibition, Art Walk Hub Portobello
VESSEL Group Exhibition, mote102 Ferry Rd Leith
Coracle Launch and Watery Event, Portobello Beach

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