Gina Wall
Gina Wall
- Programme Director, GSA H&I BA (Hons), MLitt, PhD, SFHEA, InSEA
- ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7180-7686- Job Title
- Programme Director, GSA H&I BA (Hons), MLitt, PhD, SFHEA, InSEA
- School or Academic Area
- Interdisciplinary Research
- School or Academic Area Supervised for
- School of Fine Art, Interdisciplinary Research
- G.Wall@gsa.ac.uk
- Professional Address
- GSA Highlands & Islands, Blairs Farm Steading, Altyre Estate, Forres, IV36 2SH
- Country
- United Kingdom
Biography
Gina’s research is concerned with landscape, time, hauntology and photography. She actively collaborates with practitioners from different disciplines; walking, thinking and practising with others. Gina’s practice-based research seeks to develop transdisciplinary understandings of landscape and place, rurality and future heritages. She is an invited member of several research networks including Land2, the RSE funded International Network for Contemporary Archaeology in Scotland (INCAScot), and the RSE & RIA funded Rural Reimagined network. Gina is the GSA Co-ordinator for the Arctic Sustainable Art and Design Thematic Network of the University of the Arctic and a member of the cross disciplinary Reading Landscapes research group at The Glasgow School of Art. She holds a practice-based PhD from the University of Dundee/DJCAD and is a Senior Fellow of the HEA. Gina has an established record of supervising PhD candidates to completion and is especially interested in working with practice-based PhD candidates engaged in interdisciplinary creative projects.
Research Interests
photography, place, time, landscape-as-archive, philosophy, contemporary archaeology, future heritage
Grants
2025 AHRC DFA Celtic Crescent Creative Economy
Doctoral Focal Award Funding in the Arts and Humanities, investing in research talent through Celtic Crescent (CC) collaborative DFAs will provide a direct route to supporting regional innovation, underpinning the success of the UK's creative microclusters beyond urban centres and, therefore the wider UK Creative Economy.
Project Co-Lead
2025 SGSAH Collaborative Doctoral Award with Historic Environment Scotland
Project: Designing with heritage materials for sustainable futures: a practice-based, architectural inquiry
A practice-based architectural inquiry into designing with heritage materials for sustainable, circular futures. The funded PhD project will explore the creative potential for the use of vernacular materials in innovative, contemporary architecture for impactful contribution to rural environments.
Project Lead and Primary Supervisor
2022-2024 shielin-bough: exploring the intangible cultural heritage of food and shelter in the north through inter-cultural storytelling
PI in collaboration with Co-I Prof. Timo Jokela
(www.shielinbough.co.uk)
Funders: Scottish Government, Finnish Institute UK + Ireland, University of the Arctic
Amount: £26K
Research Development Awards
2024 Research Development Fund: New Genre Arctic Art and Art Education Exhibition, Arctic Congress Bodø,
PI in collaboration with Co-I Prof. Timo Jokela
2022 GSA Research Development Fund: Hauntings of Empire in the Highlands & Islands, in collaboration with Dr Nalini Paul, School of Fine Art
Co-I
2022 GSA Student Partnership Fund: Food as a catalyst for inter-cultural understanding, in partnership with XinXin Li, Masters of Design Innovation: Interaction Design
Co-I
2022 GSA Research Development Fund: Food, creativity and future heritage
PI in collaboration with Co-I Marente van der Valk
2016 GSA Research Development Fund: conference presentation - Spectral Encounters’ Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory, Archaeology Institute: University of the Highlands and Islands
PI
Funded Sabbaticals
Short sabbatical: field work and visual research (UHI)
May 2014 → Sep 2014
Supported photographic fieldwork in Iceland and follow-on academic research (published)
Full sabbatical: field work and visual research (UHI)
Jun 2008 → Feb 2009
Research time awarded for the partial completion of practice-led PhD
PGR Supervision Interests
Gina has supervised interdisciplinary practice-based PhD projects with academics from disciplines such as archaeology, creative writing, anthropology, design innovation and criminology. She works primarily between photography and writing, but is interested in supervising across disciplines.
Current PGR Students
CC Ozdogan: Space Tumulus: Un/digging the Garden of Ghosts
(Primary Supervisor)
Andrew MacCrimmon: Assembled Movies: The Film Works of Allan Sekula, 2001-2013
(Primary Supervisor)
Susan Torrance: Liberating the Archive
(Primary Supervisor)
Maria Howard: Tree for Column: Mapping the relationship between colonialism and climate through the built and natural heritage of the ‘second city of the empire’
(Co-Supervisor)
Ellie Ballantine: Sensing the refuge: navigating multispecies temporalities and naturecultural landscapes through art research in Britain’s rainforests
SGSAH Funded, Edinburgh College of Art
(Co-Supervisor)
Former PGR Students
Imagining a Polyvocal Prison Image Archive: Socially engaged photography and the aesthetics of ethics in spaces of incarceration
Dr Alice Myers
Funded by Carnegie PhD Scholarship
(Primary Supervisor)
Painting Nostalgia: A Rhizomatic Exploration of Memory and Affect
Dr Rongwei Zhang
(Primary/Co-Supervisor)
Cilliní sites, mediations on infant burial, loss and bereavement through visual art practice
Dr Sheena Graham George
(Primary Supervisor)
Heather, hill and highland cattle: A re-evaluation of the image in the Highlands c. 1850-1940
An exploration of the visual representation of the Gàidhealtachd in the 18th and 19th centuries - submitted in Gaelic
Dr Eleanor MacDougall
Winner of the inaugural Farquhar Macintosh award for outstanding academic achievement
(Co-Supervisor)
In the forest, field and studio: art/making/methodology and the more than written in the rendering of place
Dr Amanda Thomson
Funded by HIE and the Forestry Commission
(Co-Supervisor)
Teaching
Gina is an accomplished academic with over 25 years experience in higher education, including extensive programme design, course development and validation. She has taught both theory and practice across the tertiary system in the UK, but recently her focus has been on Masters level teaching and PhD supervision. She has enjoyed making a contribution to taught Masters in Fine Art, the MRes in Creative Practice and the GSA Research Degrees Training programme on her own practice based research, along with fieldwork, and other practice-based research methodologies.
Latest Additions
- Haavisto, Ella and Wall, Gina (2024) Shielin-bough: Building Collaboration Across the North. In: Relate North: New Genre Art Education Beyond Borders. InSEA Publications, Rovaniemi, pp. 86-113. ISBN 9789893568446 (print), 9789893568453 (pdf)
- Wall, Gina and Jokela, Timo (2024) A Northern Shelter for Shared Learning. In: Mapping the New Genre Arctic Art Education. University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, pp. 135-137. ISBN 9789523374577 (e-pub), 9789523374584 (print)
- Wall, Gina (2024) Sherds and bags.
- Wall, Gina, Hale, Alex, Mersinis, Michael and Brind, Susan (2024) Practicing Landscape Field Guide No. 2: Landscapes of Energy and Extraction: Landscape as Archive. Practicing Landscape: Field Guide, 1 (2). Reading Landscape, Glasgow. ISBN 9781738527571
- Wall, Gina and Hale, Alex (2024) Landscape as Archive. In: Practicing Landscape: Field Guide No.2: Landscapes of Energy and Extraction: Landscape as Archive. Practicing Landscape Field Guides: Landscapes of Energy and Extraction (2). Reading Landscape, pp. 3-41. ISBN 978-1-7385275-7-1
- Wall, Gina and Jokela, Timo (2024) New Genre Arctic Art and Art Education Exhibition, Arctic Congress Bodø.
- Wall, Gina and Jokela, Timo (2024) Shielin-bough: A Shelter for Learning Together. Shared Voices.
- Bird, Nicky, Brind, Susan, Carter, Justin, Evans, Brian, Elkovich, Carol, Greated, Marianne, Harold, Jim, Hooper, Alan, McMullan, Shauna, Mersinis, Michael, Punton, Lesley, Thomson, Amanda and Wall, Gina (2023) Pedagogy of Place - A Field Guide to Reading Landscape for Artists, Architects, & Designers. Intellect Books, Bristol.
- Wall, Gina, Jokela, Timo, Morris, Gabby, Haavisto, Ella and Iivonen, Pinja (2023) Shielin-bough: intercultural connections. GSA Highlands & Islands. ISBN 9781739408602
- Wall, Gina (2022) Trans-corporeal photographies: landscapes of a more than human world. In: Relate North #9. InSEA Publications, Viseu, Portugal, pp. 62-81. ISBN 978-989-53600-4-8
