Panorama Research Presentation: Amanda Thomson with Alan McKirdy

Join us for an afternoon with artist Amanda Thomson as she reflects on her microresidency as part of Collective’s 2025 Panorama programme. The residency invited Thomson to respond to the world’s first panorama (1788), created by Robert Barker on Calton Hill.

Thomson’s research explored how Baker’s panorama explicitly and intrinsically captured the different layers of Edinburgh: its geology and geography as well as its built environment.

Thomson will present on her different strategies to explore the city and its surrounding areas from different perspectives; the near and the far, past to present. Using newer technologies (e.g. trail cameras) and older ways of looking (archives/ historical documents) to consider responses to Barker’s original panorama.

Thomson has also invited geologist and writer Alan McKirdy to present on the geology of Edinburgh and James Hutton’s lost drawings, an avenue of research that Thomson found particularly intriguing.

Event Schedule

• Amanda Thomson (reflections on the panorama, her use of a trail camera, and discovering James Hutton’s lost drawings)
• Alan McKirdy (the geology of Edinburgh and James Hutton)
• Q & A / In-conversation with Amanda and Alan

About the artists

Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer who is also a part-time lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. Originally trained as a printmaker, her interdisciplinary work is often about notions of home, movements, migrations, landscapes, and the natural world and how places come to be made. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her latest book belonging was shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, 2023. Also in 2023 Thomson’s film essay Boundary Layers was part of A Fragile Correspondence, commissioned by Scotland+Venice and Scotland's Collateral event for the 23rd Venice Architecture Biennale, with a second iteration in the V&A Dundee, 2025.

Alan McKirdy is a popular writer on geology and has helped to promote the study of environmental geology in Scotland. He is the author of Set in Stone: The Geology and Landscapes of Scotland and before his retirement he was Head of Knowledge and Information Management at Scottish Natural Heritage. He is now a freelance writer and frequently gives talks on Scottish geology and landscapes.