Amanda Thomson


Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer who is also a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. Originally trained as a printmaker, her interdisciplinary work is often about notions of home, movements, migrations, landscapes and the natural world and how places come to be made. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her writing has appeared in The Willowherb Review, Gutter and the anthologies Antlers of Water, Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, edited by Kathleen Jamie, and The Wild Isles: An Anthology of the Best British and Irish nature writing edited by Patrick Barkham. In 2013 she completed her doctorate in Interdisciplinary Arts Practice. Her practice-led thesis considered the ways in which we come to know place and was rooted in Abernethy Forest in Strathspey and the forests of Morayshire, particularly Culbin. She now lives and works in Strathspey in the Scottish Highlands, and Glasgow. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, is published by Saraband Books; and a collaboration with Elizabeth Reeder, microbursts, a collection of lyric and intermedial essays, is published by Prototype Publishing.

belonging: natural histories of place, identity and home is published by Canongate Books, and is shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, 2023.
"A beautifully written meditation" Sunday Times
"outstanding" Robert MacFarlane
"A book full of questions in a genre full of answers, but it is all the more powerful and beautiful for this" Times Literary Supplement
"deservedly shortlisted for the Wainwright prize this year...it’s a lovely exploration of northern Scotland and most notably the pine woods of Abernethy, but for all that specificity, there’s also an all-encompassing belief in the importance of listening, looking and learning from the world around us..." The Observer

Currently showing in The Silent Archive, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, February - May 2024

Boundary Layers, a film essay about Ravenscraig, the former site of Europe's largest steelworks, is part of A Fragile Correspondence,Scotland+Venice, Scotland's Collateral event for the 23rd Venice Architecture Biennale, 20 May – 26 November 2023, _docks_cantieri cucchini, S. Pietro di Castello, 40, 30122 Venice.

Mainly in Sinuosities, explorations and interventions on the Union Canal in Edinburgh, was commissioned as part of Channels, the Associate Artist Programme curated by Emmie McLuskey, part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2022

For over a decade now a lot of Thomson's work has been about Abernethy Forest, within Cairngorms National Park and she is delighted to be an Artist-in-Residence with Cairngorms Connect - a landscape restoration project with a 200-year vision to enhance habitats, species and ecological processes across a vast area within the Cairngorms National Park, with Elizabeth Reeder and Robbie Synge, funded by The Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme