Islands and ideas of the north: Case Studies of 20th Century artistic practice from Orkney, Shetland, Faroe Islands, Iceland & Greenland

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My PhD research, in the School of Art History at St Andrews University in Scotland, explores visual responses or entanglements with landscape in women’s practice in the boreal islands of the North Atlantic in the 20th century. 

Using the lens of island studies, I seek to explore what Lindsey Drury calls the ‘aesthetics of remoteness’. In doing so, I challenge representations of the north that have tended to portray it, in the words of Christopher Heuer and Robert G David, as a tabula rasa or ‘non-site’ for national and imperialist ambitions. In doing so, I seek to bring in feminist perspectives to my studies of 20th-century island practice, bringing attention to the specific nature of gender in an island context.

I do this by focusing on very specific case studies of practice that are defined (in my analysis) by their attention to the ‘lived reality’  of island life in the north, focusing on its complex and interconnected web of ecologies, its more-than-human dimensions (that is, a focus that is not human-centric), which I argue, reflects the actuality of island life, not fantasies of it.

My overarching aim is to create an archipelagic (that is relational and non-linear), transnational, possibly transhemispheric, framework of analysis that can be used to examine excluded histories that have existed outside mainstream, mostly male-defined discourses, and which cannot always be framed, necessarily, in institutional contexts. I focus on women’s practice because it has been overlooked in the literature related to visual representations of the north, though this is starting to be addressed. 

I do note, however, that while the examples of practice I focus on tend to be well known within their own region or country, they have limited recognition beyond that. Hence the reason for my attention. To come back to the term ‘archipelagic’, I seek to frame such practices within a broader frame of oceanic and trans-oceanic thinking, to consider ways of making connections across the northern Atlantic and by extension the southern Atlantic, thinking with the north, rather than with the nation, so as identify transcultural connections between artistic practice that transcend national boundaries and open up a much more fluid way of thinking about them, which is relevant to a 21st-century global context. 

An island studies framework is useful too in a periphery-centre context in that it puts islands at the centre of discussion, offsetting historical peripheral thinking. A September 2025 symposium, The Future of Northern and Arctic Islands 2050 and Beyond, hosted by the University of Highlands and Islands, Shetland, highlights the growing importance of islands today. Andrew Jennings, who heads UHI’s island network, noted: ‘For decades, many northern islands existed on the quiet periphery of global affairs. That era is definitively over'. This sentiment echoed across the symposium. Given the ongoing climate crisis in the Arctic and increasing geo-political tensions, islands of the north can no longer be considered peripheral but have rather assumed the status of key players, critical in contemplating the most compelling issues of today.

Such attention, in the political sphere ripples out to encompass interest in the cultural dimensions of islands too. 

I hope to argue that focusing on the ‘island’ aspect of so-called marginal art histories enables perspectives from the periphery to centre, rather than from the centre outwards: It banishes, in a sense, the idea of periphery as has been traditionally imagined in mainstream art history. In doing so, I hope to bring islands into a discourse that both puts them at the centre, and which also fundamentally reimagines what the centre can be.

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