Open the Door 2021: In Conversation with Amanda Thomson and Amy Gear

Open the Door, Scotland’s first ever festival for women’s writing returns this year for its fifth edition! Inspired by Glasgow’s long history of bold, creative women, our theme this year is writers who are artists and artists who are writers, and we’re celebrating how women creatives weave these two practices together.

In Conversation with Amanda Thomson and Amy Gear, Monday 10th May, 1pm to 2pm, Online

At this Creative Conversations event, artist and writer Amanda Thomson will be talking to Shetland artist Amy Gear about the interconnection of the visual and the written in her practice.

Amanda’s interdisciplinary work explores notions of home, movements, migrations, and how places come to be made. Amy is an artist as well as co-founder of Gaada, a Shetland arts organisation that has most recently collaborated with GWL for the Weemin’s Wark project. Amy will be talking to Amanda about the overlapping themes of landscape and nature in their work and what creative tensions or connections there are between art and writing in their creative practice.

Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer. Her interdisciplinary work is often about notions of home, movements, migrations, landscapes and the natural world and how places come to be made. Her writing has appeared in The Willowherb Review and the anthologies Antlers of Water, Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, edited by Kathleen Jamie, and The Wild Isles, edited by Patrick Barkham. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, is published by Saraband Books and a collaboration with Elizabeth Reeder, microbursts, a collection of intermedial essays on illness and grief, is published by Prototype Publishing.

Amy Gear is an artist from Shetland who makes projects, prints, paintings, performances and poetry and some other things that don’t begin with ‘P’ like sculptures and workshops. Amy’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally. She has worked as a lecturer and print technician in art schools across Scotland, as well as a lead artist on large scale collaborative projects for arts organisations. Amy is a director at Gaada which she co-founded in 2018 and applies her creativity and imagination to developing all aspects of the organisation, including (but not limited to) developing projects, running workshops, supporting artists and print editioning.

This is one of our Attend events this Spring. You can sit back and enjoy the conversation whilst also having the opportunity to ask your own questions in an audience Q and A. This event is one of the University of Glasgow’s Creative Conversations series. Open the Door continues online from Thursday 20th May to Saturday 22nd May and you can see all our Open the Door festival events here.

Please note that this event will be recorded.

Open the Door 2021 is supported by the Open University in Scotland, University of Glasgow and the British Council.

Booking

This event is free and open to all. To attend, please visit the University of Glasgow’s Creative Conversations page to sign up to this event through Eventbrite here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/open-the-door-in-conversation-amanda-thomson-and-amy-gear-tickets-149160423843

Accessibility

This session takes place via an online video call link. If you would like to attend, please book below and we will share an email invitation along with simple and straight forward instructions on how this will work. If you have any concerns about how this will work for you, please do get in touch and we’ll do all we can to support you in joining the session.

Stagetext Live Captioning will be available at this event.