Welcome to this web site for Dr Iain Biggs, RWA

I started my professional life working as a painter/printmaker/teacher but am now involved in a whole weave of different practices. These include deep mapping, writing, drawing, and, more recently, site-specific performance and time-based work. Like my research interests, all this is largely oriented to exploring the relationship between people and ecologies of place, community, memory, and identity.

I’m currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Dundee, a Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University and at UWE, Bristol, where I worked as Reader in Visual Art Practice and Director of the PLaCE (England) Interdisciplinary Research Centre until March 2013. I continue to work with the PLaCE International (UK), LAND2, and Mapping Spectral Traces networks. Since leaving UWE I’ve held a Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Like the artist Alastair MacLennan I have come to see teaching as one limb – maybe even the trunk – of my creative practice. I’m currently supervising/advising doctoral students in Scotland, Ireland and England.

This site documents both what I’m doing now and some past aspects of my work – largely deep mappings, various kinds of writing, wall-based visual art, and book works published through Wild Conversations Press Although it has to be divided into discrete sections, you’ll will find that there are numerous overlaps, blending and general ‘leakages’ between these activities – which accurately reflects my approach.

Photographic credits – unless otherwise credited all photographic images used on this site are my own.