It’s hard to believe it’s my last term at  Edinburgh College of Art.  It has been a long road; six years of studying part-time, driving the wild pilgrims’ road across the hills to my ‘other studio’ in the Old Town.  The final push will be work for my degree show in May.

The first job is to clear our big barn, ready for a new installation which will form a virtual appendix to the work I show at the university. We’ll be moving the big hay bales, rationalising the junk and re-piling the growing heaps of felled timber.  That done, it will be wonderful space to showcase my larger works.

I love the way the sun filters through the slats of the handling area and plan to use this for some more calico hangings, using the light as I did for the Tanasg series.  I’m preparing MDF boards for some new modular work to go on the barn walls, probably an extension of the Rhinns series, moving above the horizon into the wild Galloway skies.

The newly cleared and power-hosed space will get a ‘christening’ in March, when I give a workshop for this year’s Spring Fling Rural Mural artists.  They’re coming to look at the parallels between the media they use for street art and the rural-equivalent materials I use.  It will be interesting to see how their ideas feed into my work.