Terra Incognita V - culmination

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.

As part of the Newstead Sundial Festival in September, Kat and Zoe are presenting a final workshop that forms a culmination of this year's terra Incognita project. Questioning the political power of mapping, Terra Incognita is a series of walks and photography workshops to gather stories that have historically been left out of official maps, archives and collections.

This is the fifth 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