15 September 2026
Lyon & Turnbull | Chloë Siemens
We are delighted to present our 2026 Graduate Showcase Award winner, Chloë Siemens. As part of Award, Chloë Siemens will spend a week working at the Bothy Project on the beautiful Scottish island of Eigg. A showcase of Chloë Siemens' work will be exhibited in our Edinburgh saleroom in August 2027 alongside our Contemporary Art auction.
Chloë Siemens is an interdisciplinary landscape artist whose practice looks at the nature of boundaries, transience, and memory within natural environments.
Drawn particularly to the supposed ‘edges’ of the known landscape – the coastlines of northern Scotland and her islands - where mythologies, ecologies, and the elements collide, Chloë uses methods of gathering, abstraction, and layering to investigate the way we might navigate our relationship to the land in these places.
She focuses on ‘fleeting moments of passing’ such as the transference of body over and through natural boundary, the ever-changing flux of the waterline at riverbank and beach, and the remains left in nature by human presence. Using collected fieldnotes, sketches, recordings, and found natural materials from these moments, she layers, abstracts, deconstructs, and re-layers her findings to create installations that reflect the strata of landscape, and the multidimensional and multisensory experience of being within it.
Through these layers, she looks to understand her own sense of belonging and place, drawing parallels between more intimate passages in the landscape and wider experiences of flux, migration, movement, and change.
Whilst on Eigg, Chloë intends to research the nature of island-ness, both from a landscape and personal perspective. She looks for what islands, and their subsequent feelings of isolation, exposure, and distance, may reveal to us about our understandings of nature and place as a whole.
‘trace’ is a short film of the coastlines of Scotland and their ecologically diverse, fluid, and ever-changing natures. It loops, with no definite end or beginning, reflecting the cycles of time that shape us and the land. The film’s soundtrack, composed and performed by Euan Stamper, uses the drone of a harmonium to echo the sound of constant wind on the coastlines, layered over the film’s own raw audio of water and wind. At once meditative and eerie, it slowly undulates like the landscape and swell in which the viewer becomes immersed.
