Jackie Flanagan, a student on the MA Contemporary Art and Archaeology, recently participated in an exhibition entitled Holding Conversations at the Custom Lane Gallery in Leith, Edinburgh.
Her submitted piece, Ghost-Geographies IV, is part of a wider series developed during her postgraduate studies. The work used photography and mapping to explore ideas from contemporary art and archaeological practice. It focuses on St Magnus Cathedral, treating the building as a site where memory, imagination, and personal response intersect. Walking-based cartographic lines are drawn across the photographic surface, connecting the artist’s movements with the architectural space and creating a form of radical cartography.
The piece reflects on how past and present interact, and how individual experience can contribute to the ongoing story of a historic site. Within the exhibition space, the work also forms part of a wider dialogue between neighbouring artworks, in keeping with the exhibition’s theme of objects and practices that “hold” encounters, exchanges, and conversations.
