Walking/Talking with Claire Pencak and Gail Sneddon
As part of my Embedded Artist research with The Work Room, I joined Claire Pencak for a conversation about walking, place, practice, and how we stay connected from where we are.
Originally, we had both imagined walking while speaking. We had each chosen routes close to home, places that connected to what we wanted to share. In the end, we met on Zoom, as the places we wanted to talk from had no reception.
We arrived with images, memories, and traces of the landscapes we each move through.
Claire brought images from the Borders: rowan trees thick with moss, woodland landscapes, and a photograph of the same tree after the wood around it had been cleared and the ground treated with chemicals. The image held a quiet shock — the tree still there, but its surrounding world changed.
I shared images from my own local landscape in the North East, including the aftermath of last summer’s wildfires on the Dava Moor. The fires had decimated areas of forest and moorland, but I had also been noticing the beginnings of new growth. In both our images, there was a sense of landscape as something wounded, altered, and still alive.
Our conversation moved through images of loss and change in the land: logging, clearances, forest fires, Sitka spruce plantations, and the traces of action groups and community care for woodland places. We spoke about stone, trees, and a shared love of working with materials held in and shaped by the land.
Claire spoke about her collaborations with archaeologists and people from other fields, and I enjoyed hearing how these relationships support and deepen her practice. There was something important in this for me — the idea that practice does not only develop through arts networks, but through conversations, sites, materials, histories, and people with different kinds of knowledge.
We also spoke about gathering. What kinds of arts gatherings feel nourishing, if any? What can be learned from rural gatherings, ceilidhs, potato days, winter gatherings, and the everyday ways people come together? We talked about the basic things that allow people to gather well: warmth, food, time, care, welcome, and a reason to be there.
Claire spoke about being on the fringes as a generative place, rather than as a lack. She reflected on how relocating can keep a practice alive, and how her life and practice are not separate but part of the same way of living.
This resonated strongly with my own questions around practice, place, and how artists sustain connection while working from rural or dispersed locations. I am interested in what becomes possible when we stop imagining the centre as the only place where practice is held, developed, or recognised. What if being at the edge, in the woods, on the moor, in a village hall, beside a field, or in conversation across distance is not peripheral, but deeply generative?
My conversation with Claire left me thinking about how landscapes hold memory and damage, but also how they hold practice. They ask something of us. They shape how we move, gather, listen, and make.
Part of Gail Sneddon’s Embedded Artist research with The Work Room, exploring how members across Scotland gather, connect, and sustain practice across distance. Read about the Embedded Artists 2026-27 announcement here.
Gail Sneddon trained at Trinity Laban Conservatoire before touring as a dancer with Nigel Charnock, Athina Vahla, and Ersatz. She later completed a Master’s in Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design.
Her work spans performance, design, and direction, with collaborations including Mute Records, National Theatre of Scotland, Candoco Dance Company, Claire Cunningham, and Cora Bissett. She has held leadership roles at The Beacon Arts Centre, Dance North Scotland, and Barrowland Ballet, and recently founded Company Hame, a platform for collaborative, place-responsive work connecting people through shared creative practice.
She is currently developing two new works: The Shape of Grief, a project exploring lost mourning rituals and the ways we carry grief, shaped by research into procession and Scotland’s historic coffin roads; and HEL, an dance film set in a disused multi-storey car park in the Scottish Highlands, exploring youth culture and the mythology of the underworld.