Jemima Hall is an artist and educator of ancestral skills, based in the islands of Scotland’s Inner and Outer Hebrides. She is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the ethnobotanical uses of natural materials within island and coastal environments, through experimental and experiential architecture. Evolving within fluctuating elements, Jemima studies a story of human resilience by creativity and survival, questioning our understanding of the habitable and uninhabitable, inspiring inter-island connections, and re-mapping the notions of centre and periphery.
Jemima studies thatching, weaving, rope making, braiding, walls and windows using heather, grasses, stone, peat, animals and most notably, seaweed. The work is expressed through sculpture, visual poetry, film, photography, drawing and writing.

Undertaking several self-funded expeditions into Scotland’s remotest landscapes, Jemima spent over a month in solitude on the uninhabited Shiant Islands and several weeks on the uninhabited island of Lunga, as well as living in a cave on the island of Gometra. It is in these landscapes that Jemima learns about seaweeds and their changing strengths, their weight, durability, gathering methods, and is captured by their translucency which exhibits a display of golden and green light. She experiments with their uses in thatching, weaving, rope making, braiding and wall building. Seaweeds, with their rich ethnobotanical history, tell a story of human resilience, creativity, and survival. 

This exploration echoes the broader challenges of our changing climate.

Jemima invites the viewer into the liminal ‘moons-land’ where land meets sea, and asks them: Can humanity evolve to live fluidly within these fluctuating environments?