Saturday 24.01 | 11am-2pm
At our studio, Unit 1B Cedar Units, Webbers Yard, Dartington (next to Luna’s Bakehouse)
Free, drop-in event, open to all! Sign up here.
We’re delighted to announce the next session of our Resource Saturday series with Iman Datoo and Siobhan MacLaughlin, exploring the centrality of place and care in their artistic practices. Working with gathered pigments, plants, soil, each artist considers alternative frameworks of knowledge; thinking on how we behave, form impressions, and hold memory in landscapes and communities.
Speakers:
Iman Datoo (b.1995) is a transdisciplinary artist and Head of Research & Community at Radical Ecology. Her practice investigates the world-making capacities of plants, soils and people - how we move, behave and make place. Working through video, clay-work, scoring, installation and performance, she crafts situated projects that become worlds in themselves: narrative spaces where people can gather, journey and make with the land through their bodies.
At the centre of Iman’s work is “kinnomics”, a transitional framework that shifts thinking away from an economics of commodification toward making kin with overlooked care-workers and labourers, foregrounding an intimate planetary existence in which the human is never at the centre but constantly embroiled in relation. She understands the imaginary not as a place of escape but as a liminal zone, where alternative values and ways of being can be improvised and practiced through stories of repair.
Iman is currently the 2025 Stonecroft Art in Residence with Agnes Etherington Arts Centre and Queen’s University Biological Field Station, and was recently part of the Two Together Residency with Porthmeor Studios and the Freelands Foundation. She is a LAHP-funded, practice-led PhD candidate between UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art and the Bartlett School of Architecture.
Her debut solo exhibition Kinnomics opened at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre in 2025. Recent exhibitions include Gray’s Wharf Gallery (Cornwall, 2024), Travelling Gallery (Edinburgh Arts Festival, 2025), Southcombe Barn (Dartmoor, 2025, 2024), KARST (Plymouth, 2023), The Eden Project (St Austell, 2022-3) and The Plumb (Toronto, 2023). She has led workshops and performances at institutions such as Newlyn Art Gallery, the Natural History Museum, Counterpoint Arts, Cambridge University, and Tate Britain.
Siobhan McLaughlin (b.1994) is an artist and curator based in Glasgow. She graduated with First Class MA (Hons) in Fine Art at Edinburgh University in 2019 and has since been awarded the SSA Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Award at the Royal Scottish Academy and a film commission from the Tate’s British Art Network. More recently, Siobhan was awarded a VACMA Award, an RSA Residencies for Scotland at Cromarty Arts Trust, the Black Isle, a Visual Art Scotland Cornwall Exchange Residency and a Stephen Palmer Travel Award. Her engagement work includes leading public engagement for Helensburgh Pond Redevelopment with Argyle & Bute Council in 2025 and regularly leading creative workshops for kids with Creative Hangouts in Glasgow, or individual projects with the Sculpture Dye House, Paisley.
As well as exhibiting regularly, she has curated a major private collections exhibition at Dovecot Studios for the centenary of Scottish artist Alan Davie. Alan Davie: Beginning of a far-off WorlD was held at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh 24th June - 24th September 2022. In July 2023, her project Scottish Landscapes: A New Generation opened at Dovecot Studios. Alongside exhibition tours and talks, she produced an engagement programme for the duration of the exhibition including workshops with WHALE Arts, The Ripple Project and SCORE Scotland.
A Bit About Our Ecology as Method Studio Programme and Resource Saturdays:
Until March, Ecology as Method will form the seedbed of Radical Ecology activity at the studio in Dartington. Exploring Ecology as a way of seeing ourselves and our connection to one another and to the world, and Method of creativity through which we can constellate meaning and cultivate newness in the world. The Ecology as Method programme will share some of our learning around the ways of approaching our creative lives, and build questions of how we resource ourselves in the context of this crisis ridden decade.
As part of this, once a month, we open our studio doors to create a space where our community can share work. We’ll be bringing together guest speakers whose own practices shed light and inspire action and learning around questions of what ecology as method is in practice.
Find out more about our programme here.