Bothy Project

Visual Arts Scotland is delighted to announce the sixth year of residency in partnership with Bothy Project in October 2026. This opportunity offers a member of Visual Arts Scotland the chance to spend a week-long residency at Sweeney’s Bothy, a simple, off grid building in unique surroundings on the stunning Isle of Eigg, part of the Scottish Inner Hebrides. Sweeney’s Bothy is situated on croft land, with its elevated position in Cleadale, close to Eigg’s northern tip. The building was developed in collaboration with artist Alec Finlay as part of Creative Scotland’s Year of Natural Scotland in 2013. This dedicated off-grid artist residency space is purpose-built to offer practitioners in visual arts, craft and design, music, literature, and performance, as well as thinkers, researchers, and people local to each Bothy, direct creative engagement with the Scottish wilderness. The residency will take place from the 10th-17th October 2026 and all reasonable travel up to £250 and accommodation costs are included. There will also be a £720 artist fee provided by VAS for the successful applicant. There will be an online information session on Thursday 4th June 5-6pm for anyone interested in applying that may have questions about the residency, the island, its facilities or the application process. More details on this are to follow. Send your application to [email protected] with 6 images of your recent work compiled in a single PDF, along with text outlining the following points (please limit your answers for each point to 300 words): - What is your current practice? - Why would you like this opportunity? - How do you hope the time at Sweeney’s Bothy will help inform your practice? - How would you document and share your experiences on the island? - How would you approach travelling sustainably to the Island? Please make sure to complete the application form (link in our bio). You can also find a guide to applying to opportunities on our website. Deadline: 14th June 2026 5pm Poster by @alasdairdimmick Artwork by precious Bothy residency recipient @priiyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

This month we're excited to welcome residents Aoife Herrity, Mhairi Law and Trish Scott to Sweeney's Bothy! Aoife Herrity is an Irish lens-based arist, writer, and lecturer based in Dublin. Aoife is a returning resident and is working to resolve their ongoing project 'left me with the fears of a bird'. This body of work was established through two previous visits to Sweeney's Bothy in 2024 and 2025, and responds to the medieval Irish poem 'Buile Suibhne'. Mhairi Law is an artist-photographer and curator based on the Isle of Lewis. She is founder of @island_darkroom and @_lumendesigns . In her own photographic practice, Mhairi uses medium format film to look at the landscapes around her and explore how cultures historically and currently bond visually with their environments. On Eigg, she will capture a new series of photos that depict Sweeney's Bothy and its surrounding landscape and community. Trish Scott is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator and researcher based in Margate. Much of her work is socially engaged and includes programming, organisational development and participatory work within museums and galleries. She's currently working on a new auto-theoretical body of work that's focused on neurodivergent creativity. On Eigg, she will explore how distraction, drift and indecision operate as generative forces within her practice. Images: 1. Portrait of Aoife Herrity, courtesy of the artist. 2. Portrait of Mhairi Law at 'GAFFER', An Tobar Arts Centre, Mull, 2025. Photo by Kirsty Law. 3. Trish Scott, slide from 'Echogenerative Practice', a citational performance presented at Foundling Museum and KCL, 2025.

I had a beautifully grounding time on a residency at the Isle of Eigg! I spent most days hiking across the island in all kinds of weather, collecting materials and objects. My dissertation in final year of @edinburghcollegeofart explored walking as an embodied research methodology - this residency felt like a natural extension, letting walking shape my ideas and practice. Thank you so much to @bothyproject and @lyonandturnbull for funding this experience!

We're thrilled to announce our Self-Directed Residents for 2026-27: Robert Baldock, Mymona Bibi, Jude Browning, Malgorzata Dawidek, Helena Fornells Nadal, Rosie Freeman, Liza Goncharenko, Helena Gouveia Monteiro, Nathalie Guimbretière, Aoife Herrity, Peter Holliday, Adrian Leung, Lynsey MacKenzie, Beccy McCray, Peadar-Tom Mercier, Ania Mokrzycka, Carolyn Roy, Helena Sanders, Alex Sarkisian, Trish Scott, Tash Walker and Molly M. Whawell. This year's residents join us from Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Poland and across the UK, bringing practices that span experimental filmmaking, music composition, dance, performance, poetry, curation and visual art. The residencies will take place between May 2026 and March 2027 across two locations: Sweeney's Bothy, Isle of Eigg and @Grinneabhat , a community-owned cultural space on the Isle of Lewis. We're delighted to be working with Grinneabhat for the first time and to be exploring ways of developing our working partnership further. The residents were selected by a panel made up of Anne Campbell, Arun Sood and Sarah Calmus. Our Self-Directed Creative Residencies last one week and are a self-funded route for practitioners in visual arts, craft & design, music, literature, performance with at least three years of active practice, and who are based in the UK or Europe. The next open call for Self-Directed Residencies will take place in December 2026. 🔗 Read more about the residents via the link in our bio

my week of slowing down, walking, listening on the Isle of Eigg in February with The Bothy Project moving between caves, cliffs and shoreline, tracing tides, wind, rock, water and air, following vibrations as they move through different materials and states playing the shruti box in Cathedral Cave and St Columba’s Church, letting sustained tones meet these two resonant spaces, one shaped by ancient volcanoes, the other designed for human ritual thinking about resonance as a meeting point between landscape and body inside the Bothy, time drifted between feeding the stove fire, reading in the book lined nook and recording electric bass, focusing on slow subtle variation and timbral instability, while rain and gales swept across the Isle of Rùm the opportunity to slow down, live simply and work with minimal means felt incredibly valuable. some of this will be part of future releases and work for @radiophreniaglasgow grateful for the people I met along the way, and for the powerful story of Eigg's community buyout which left in me a strong sense of hope merci @bothyproject + @creativescots for the time and space

reflecting on a wonderful residency on Eigg last month with @bothyproject . An invigorating, immersive week of rock studying and clambering, fire making, observing weather morphologies, pondering sea swell, writing and training myself in deep(er) listening... ....roaming, getting lost, tracing, following and deviating with lines in the landscape became a parallel exercise in vocal and sonic wayfaring - re-connecting with different facets of my voice and ears and allowing them to wander. ....,...... taking signals from geological and archaeological patterns as a kind of score for finding sounds/words and unfolding the voice. ........................................................................ I thought a lot about the deep time of basalt as an ancient composite record of many layered layered layered energies and material transformations; ...............................and about echoes, spirit signals and the compression & release of the (female) voice….,.... . the opportunity to just slow right down, live simply and let these things percolate was so valuable and needed. In many ways the place rather possessed me (as these photos may suggest). Gradually some new solo work will be emerging... a huge thanks to Bothy Project for selecting me as one of their 2025/26 residents! 🪨 🪨 *pages shown in photo 18 are from John Hunter's book 'The Small Isles: Rum, Eigg, Canna and Muck', a beautifully illustrated guide to the geology, archaeology + cultural history of Scotland's small isles

All the thanks to the Bothy Project for a residency on Eigg! So much that is interesting and good to be explored, and helpful for connecting with my off grid education, land-embedded histories and familiar textures. It felt very homely to me, and all my wood splitting/fire lighting/handwashing skills were useful again! @bothyproject #artistresidency #eigg

Mo thaing do @bothyproject airson an residency ann an Eige Neart machnaimh, ceoil, agus tús ionatch an earraigh

Cairngorms 2030 residency announcement! 📣 Local artist @robynwoolston is the recipient of the 2026 Cairngorms 2030 art residency, in partnership with @bothyproject ! 🎉 During a seven-day residency at @glenesk_folk_museum , Robyn will use fieldwork and the museum’s archive to explore Glen Esk’s climate and biodiversity, uncovering hidden histories, soundscapes and community reflections. Watch this space to find out how Robyn gets on! 🌿 Cairngorms 2030 is made possible through funding by @heritagefunduk , with thanks to National Lottery players. 📸 Robyn Woolston #Cairngorms2030

Making and unmaking the edge of the cloud Before technical forecasts, cloud reading was used to foretell the future. The heavy purple warn of rain, “mare’s tails and mackerel scales” warn of coming storms. Movement, shape and colour, morphed into stories, omens and signs. Luke Howard, a chemist and amateur meteorologist, was the first to classify clouds, drawing their shapes and edges, and giving them a name. His system transformed how weather could be described and shared, shaping both new forecasting technologies and romantic paintings. Clouds became bodies with edges moving through empty air, rather than a dense sea of water, spores, seeds, pollutants, ash, smoke, and minerals stretching between ground and sky. Obsessed with how these shapes look like bad cloud renders when learning how to digitally animate clouds in softwares like Blender etc. Vids: Live testing with in-camera adjustments, trying to see the edges of clouds arriving to shore in the Isle of Eigg. ISO heightens the sensor’s sensitivity to light; aperture controls brightness through how far the lens opens itself to the sky; shutter speed gathers the cloud in realtime. Fighting the iPhone’s automatic HDR with manual exposure lets light bleed and shapes slip. <3 to @bothyproject for giving me the space to watch the clouds <3 to @jamwinstan for being my camera guide

I spent last week up on a hill in the Isle of Eigg watching the weather, thinking about storm surges and reading up on the history of forecasting. Massive thank you to the @bothyproject for such a wonder-filled week of slow clouds and green skies. 1. Sketchbook outtakes, following histories of weather forecasts and their ties to imperialism ~ birthed in golden sunsets and the Australian gold rush ~ golden nuggets and sinking economies ~ washed ashore in Wales in 1858 in an Irish Sea storm, the worst storm of 19th C they said~ sunk a boat so full of golden colonial exploits that the British Board of Trade commissioned the first shipping forecast ~ to understand the skies above was, from the start, a matter of military and economic strategy~~~to control the land, and control the sea, they first must know the skies~~~ 3-4 outtakes of outtakes 5 @bothyproject 6 The closest to the auroras I’ve found myself in Scotland More soon xoxo

A few more from my Bothy Project residency. Stones gathered, carried, rested, placed. #artistresidency #dancescotland