Amanda Thomson is a visual artist, researcher and writer. She is a part time lecturer at GSA. Dr 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 research and policy, primarily in the voluntary sector. Her creative practice is ideas and research-led and fuses an arts practice that incorporates traditional and digital printmaking techniques with photography, bookmaking, video and sound works with creative non-fiction. Her work is often about how we are located (and locate ourselves) in the world; space, place and landscape; and explorations of home, nativity, migrations chosen and forced (of people, plants, birds, things), mapping and how places come to be made. She completed an arts practice based, interdisciplinary PhD about the forests of Morayshire and Abernethy Forest in the Cairngorms in Scotland. 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. Dr Thomson 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 investigations.
Her outputs include prints, bookworks, videos, sound works, sculpture, creative non-fiction and academic writing, including articles for the Journal of Writing in Creative Arts Practice, the Journal of Performance Research and The Geographical Review. In 2018-19 Dr Thomson was a co-investigator in the AHRC project ‘The War of the Locust: science, politics, culture and collaboration in the Anti-Locust Research Centre, 1940-45’, with colleagues from the Universities of Warwick and Portsmouth.
Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, was published by Saraband in 2018. A collaboration with Elizabeth Reeder, microbursts, a collection of intermedial and experimental lyric essays on illness, care, grief and creativity, was published by Prototype publishing in 2021. She has written for BBC Radio and 4, 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. Belonging, Natural Histories of Place Identity and Home was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, 2023.
She was a commissioned artist for the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2022 and Boundary Layers, a dual-screen filmwork and spoken-word essay about nature’s reclamation of the former steelworks at Ravenscraig, Motherwell, was part of A Fragile Correspondence, Scotland’s collateral exhibition for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.
Dr Thomson is interested in cross-institutional/ cross-disciplinary ways of working, multi-modal methods of exploration and cross-genre writing.
