Terra Incognita III - collections

Through walking, photography, writing and gathering, photographers Zoe Hamill and Kat Gollock seek to create alternative maps of the middle section of the River Tweed by collecting and marking the lesser-heard memories and stories that are housed within its banks and landscapes.

To do this, they need your help! Zoe and Kat are looking for your contributions: be it a photograph of a family day out, stories or objects relating to industries along the river, found curios that remind you of a moment worth remembering or a simple memory jotted down on a piece of paper. Please bring them along!

No matter how small or how big, Kat and Zoe are looking to include as many of these unrecorded stories alongside their own explorations to create an alternative field guide to the middle Tweed.

Kat and Zoe are also happy to answer questions and share knowledge in their subject areas. Kat is on hand to offer tips and tricks of how to use your mobile phone camera while Zoe discusses alternative processing techniques, including tips about preserving personal archives.

As a thank-you for taking part, everyone who attends will receive a handmade cyanotype print featuring some of the plants found along the river.

If you can’t make the session in person we’re still very keen to hear from you with anything you would like to contribute. Please feel free to email Kat on katgollock@gmail.com to share anything you’d like to be included.

Schedule
This is a drop-in session. Call in any time between 11am and 3pm for a chat and a cuppa.

What to bring
Your photos of the river and surrounding area - Kat and Zoe will make a digital copy.

Any objects related to the river or surrounding area - Kat and Zoe will photograph your object in their pop-up studio.

Your stories about the river - Kat and Zoe will record them or write them down.

Yourself! Everyone is welcome just to come along for a chat and find out more about the project.

This is the third event in Terra Incognita, a new project conceived and delivered by photographers Zoe Hamill and Kat Gollock, and part of the Watery Commons 2025 programme by Connecting Threads.

"All these stories from below - rarely documented in the shift from feudalism to capitalism, agriculture to industry, analogue to digital - are the casualties of a history of power. In these worrying times, as things shift so far to the right, and the wrong 1% continue to dictate narratives, it feels more important than ever to work towards a shared commons."

Read more from artists Kat Gollock and Zoe Hamill on the thinking behind Terra Incognita.

About the artists

Kat Gollock
Kat Gollock is a photographer based in both Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders. As well as her commercial work, she is a teacher of photography, an exhibited photographic artist, and a published writer on the subject. Her personal work focuses predominantly on landscape and walking, often incorporating text to complement and enhance the images. Inspired by walking the landscape both on her own and with other people, the work she makes is an exploration into our place in the world, the landscape itself and the spaces we inhabit both physically and emotionally.
www.katgollock.com

Zoe Hamill
Zoe Hamill is a photographer from Co. Antrim, now living in Edinburgh. She is interested in the relationship between humans and the environment, as well as the systems of classification that we use to make sense of the world around us. As well as working on her own fine art photography projects, she is a freelance photography educator, archivist and technician where her work involves continued research into alternative processes and plant-based photography developers.
www.zoehamill.com