The Glasgow School of Art

Amanda Thomson completed her undergraduate degree at The Glasgow School of Art and gained an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also has degrees in the social sciences, and previously worked in social policy and research, primarily in the voluntary sector. Her creative practice is ideas and research-led and fuses traditional and digital printmaking techniques with photography, bookmaking, video more sculptural pieces and writing. Her artwork and writing are often about how we are located (and locate ourselves) in the world; space, place and landscape; and explorations of home, nativity, migration, mapping and how places come to be made. She completed her arts practice based, interdisciplinary PhD about the forests of Morayshire and Abernethy Forest in the Highlands of Scotland in 2013. Central to this research, and her work on place in general, is the idea that places are multi-layered, ever-changing, embodied and active, containing complex ecological, sensorial and physical histories and presences. Amanda incorporates a multi-faceted way of working that takes account of places as experiential fields of investigation, and in doing so draws on contemporary arts practice and history, human and cultural geography, anthropology, ecology, literature and social and natural history. For her PhD, she incorporated ethnographic fieldwork into her investigation of these forests. Her writing has appeared in academic journals, and her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, was published by Saraband in 2018. A collaboration with Elizabeth Reeder, microbursts, a collection of intermedial essays on illness, care, grief and creativity, was published by Prototype publishing in 2021. She has written for the radio, and her creative non-fiction has been published in, amongst other places, The Willowherb Review; the anthology Antlers of Water, Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland (Canongate, 2020), edited by Kathleen Jamie; and The Wild Isles: An Anthology of the best British and Irish nature writing (Head of Zeus, 2021), edited by Patrick Barkham.

Amanda’s research interests include place, space and landscape and how they are conceptualized, ‘natural’ and social histories, identity, interdisciplinary and multi-modal methods of exploration and cross-genre writing. She is particularly interested in cross-institutional/ cross-disciplinary ways of working.