Artist Joanne B Kaar will work with the UHI Orkney team to explore marine energy transitions in Orkney with the TRANSECTS project during a series of walkshops and year-long artist residency. Joanne is a research-based visual artist and maker based in Stromness, Orkney, with her roots in Caithness.
Joanne is proposing to use second-hand modern workwear (jackets / trousers / gloves) from the marine energy sector – All Hands on Deck. These will be deconstructed and hand stitched with text and imagery reminiscent of traditional maritime tattoos, to explore changes in marine energy transitions (whale oil, oil and gas and marine renewables) and coastal community resilience over time. The garments will be collaboratively stitched with words during a series of public workshops.
Do you have any old workwear from Flotta Oil Terminal or the marine renewables industry in Orkney that you could donate to the project? Joanne is also looking for thin coloured wire / plastic to bend into words and stitch down onto the garments. Please contact Joanne at info@joannebkaar.com
For the walkshops, old wellington boots from the marine energy sector will be upcycled by participants and used as covers for unique, individual, walking books. Pages will be a mixture of sizes with flaps, pockets and foldouts in a variety of paper types including and ephemera related to marine energy transitions and coastal community resilience.
Joanne has worked and exhibited worldwide, including Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Iceland, USA, New Zealand, Estonia and Catalonia. In 2012 she received a Museum Galleries Scotland and Creative Scotland Iconic Artists in Iconic Places award for her work on the pressed herbarium of Robert Dick, Baker and Botanist of Thurso 1811-1866.
The grass costumes she made for the Horse and Bamboo Theatre’s 2012/13 touring production about Angus MacPhee ‘Weaver of grass’, were selected in August 2025 as having national importance and accessioned into the V&A South Kensington Performance department.
Joanne has been selected twice as artist in residence by the Crafts Council of Newfoundland and Labrador, the first project was ‘House Move’ in 2016.
Recent projects include artist in residence for Strathnaver Museum, Bettyhill, Sutherland in 2024, with the project ‘ShipShape’, which documented through the medium of woodcut printmaking and letterpress, the making of a full-size replica wooden clinker build boat in the museum. Joanne is currently researching the mystery of the Magellan Daisy and Whalers. A native flower of South America, the Magellan Daisy, (Senecio smithii) has been recorded in botanical books as introduced to Caithness, Orkney and Shetland by whalers. If you have seen it growing in Orkney or have any clues to the connection with whalers, Joanne would like to know.
Joanne exhibited some of the artefacts made from soft rush and shared her research on the grass garments made by Angus MacPhee in the exhibition Buss o Gress / Tuft of Grass at Pier Arts Centre which opened on the 9th August 2025. Angus became known as the weaver of grass. Her replica grass garments are held in Glasgow Museum along with the originals.
Projects
- House Move – video. Community clothes used to make rope representing a community on the move.
- Crafts Council of Newfoundland & Labrador artist residency.
- PortABLE. Klondykers – Soviet-era fish box labels transform fisherman’s oilskin jacket.
- North – Coastal Lichen paper coat for Fabric of Place.
- Grass garments – video. Making a replica grass jumper for Joyce Laing.