Birnam Arts AiR 2025 - Collaborative Residency with Lyra Sands

In 2025, Jo Lindsay and their partner, Lyra Sands (New Media Artist), were selected to be Artists in Residence by Birnam Arts in Perthshire. Selection for this residency program included provision of an artist bursary, ten studio sessions at Birnam Arts Centre and mentoring support to facilitate initial research and development of Jo and Lyra's collaborative artistic practice.

Having worked briefly together previously on various college and university projects during their training, Jo and Lyra were keen to properly explore possibilites for collaboration between their disciplines of movement and audiovisual art, on their own terms, in a playful, experimental way. Birnam Arts' AiR provided the perfect platform for this, with no set parameters or expected outcomes, this was a truly exciting opportunity for Jo and Lyra to have the freedom to play, explore and begin discovering what forms their joint practice could take.

The starting point for initial explorations was a shared interest the concept of fractals: complex repeating patterns which frequently occur in nature across varying scales, such as in snowflakes, seashells and plants. Fractals provide a wealth of material to draw from choreographically and artistically.

Research took place across both the dance studio and the visual arts studio at Birnam Arts Centre during the ten sessions. There were several different avenues of curious exploration involving combining both improvisational and lightly choreographed movement with light painting, code-generated digital visuals, projections, drawing, painting, generating patterns, shapes and 'movement codes'.

Through each of these avenues of research into fractals, some common themes and concepts began to emerge: varying scale, repeated patterns, simple shapes, micro vs macro, and the idea of natural vs non-natural, human vs non-human, the automated and the organic.

Materials, findings and reflections from the residency are currently being collated and will soon be available to view in the form of blogs written by both Jo and Lyra independently, as well as the production of a short film documenting the research process, which will be exhibited at Birnam Arts Centre in 2026.

Jo and Lyra are now looking into further residencies and funding to continue their collaborative practice research, to refine and develop their ideas into experimental participatory workshops and live improvisation-based performance.



To see more of Lyra's work, you can visit her Instagram page @lyraisspiralling