29 August–6 September 2026
Various days and times, check below for details
Scotland’s provider of creative spaces, est 1977
Scotland’s provider of creative spaces, est 1977
Links, Nairn
29 August–6 September 2026
Various days and times, check below for details
Photograph by Marc Marnie.
The exhibition will explore ideas of place, connection, and belonging. The event also offers a rare opportunity to visit artists’ open studios, meet makers in their working environments, and browse the Art Car Boot Fair, where invited artists will gather to show and sell their work.
Participating artists are all based at Links.
Details of each event are as follows:
Art exhibition: 29 August–6 September, 11am–3pm. Closed 30 August
Opening night: 28 August, 6pm–8pm
Open studios: 5–6 September, 10am–5pm
Art car boot fair: 5 September, 10am–5pm
I am an oil painter and mixed media artist with a foundation in portraiture. My practice has moved to exploring landscapes contextualised by a fascination with Impressionism & Realism. Playing with these movements through elements of storytelling and mark making, my work looks at the mundane – the overlooked yet beautiful. I hope through my work to hold onto these fleeting moments in time, grounding us in the real, in our spaces.
The natural environment inspires and informs my current practice. Experiences of placing myself within the local landscape is further explored through process based studio experimentation; a sensory, somatic engagement with the aid of haptic memory. Inspired by artists such as Ruth Asawa and Richard Serra, my experimental approach to working enables me to push boundaries, challenging my own preconceived notions regarding my chosen materials capabilities.
For myself as an artist, paper is more than just a material, it holds a personal meaning. Paper is present in all of our lives, from the mundane roll of toilet tissue to the birth and death certificate. Paper also serves as a reminder of our connection to the environment in which we rely for our human existence, the trees which supply our oxygen to breathe and our ecosystem to flourish.
Using paper as my primary substance, I take a phenomenological approach to making, applying various techniques ranging from stitching, printing, drawing and even clay making. A constant dialogue at play between inspiration, object and artist. The resulting works I create aim to embody the relationship between human, material, form and space. Considered to be non-representational, open to interpretation and abstract in nature, I like to think the work invites a viewer response beyond the purely optical.
Katie is a painter, with a focus on still life and landscape work.
A new body of work, executed entirely en plein air, will debut in the Links Gallery at Nairn Book & Arts Festival.
Following a recent relocation, I have been inspired to respond more directly to the landscape, exploring new ways of working while retaining my established mark-making. The work ranges from sketchbook studies to large-scale canvases, all made on location to capture the immediacy of place, light, and weather. I hope viewers will sense the energy, discovery and connection to place that has shaped this new direction in my work.
I work from the physiology of my body, the landscape within, through my lived human experience. These inner places are deeply connected to the collective whole through my relationship with the natural world. My process is a dance between loosely observational figure drawing, instinctive elemental mark-making and the written word. I use an intuitive variety of mixed media: water-based paints, emulsion, inks, pastel and charcoal. I relish expanding my art practice further, through my somatic exploration and ask the viewer to join me in considering their own meaning of these three words, What is Place?
Morag Smith is a contemporary artist living in Nairn exploring ideas around Landscape, People and Places. She works mainly in a sculptural format. Morag studied Fine Art (Hons) at Moray School of Art UHI graduating in 2018. In 2016 she was one of a cohort of third year students selected to exhibit at the Nairn Book and Arts Festival ‘New Highland Contemporary 3’. Her work was awarded the inaugural Highland Fine Arts & Decorative Society Prize. In 2018 her degree show was shortlisted for the Visual Arts Scotland’s Graduate Showcase. She was one of three artists commissioned by Discover Moray’s Great Places to respond to historical characters (2020), was part of an online group exhibition entitled ‘Landscape of Place’ with An Tallas Solais (2020), exhibited in a group show as part of Circus Artspace Graduate Programme (2022), with Visual Art Scotland North in Inverness (2022) and Visual Art Scotland West in Glasgow (2023). Morag was commissioned as one of three artists to create work for an exhibition at the Suttie Art Space, GHAT in Aberdeen (2024). She was also the recipient of grants from Creative Scotland (2023), tsiMoray (2022) the Visual Arts and Crafts Makers Award (2021) and Adriana Sjim Bigman Art Grant (2020). From 2023 – 2025 she was involved in a major project delivering creative workshops to women across the Highlands and Moray. The aim of this project was to deliver a programme of activities at diverse locations, including deprived and remote/rural locations, using creativity to promote women’s confidence and wellbeing.
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