SABG's Summer Art Day | A Creative Writing Workshop

We are thrilled to invite you to a Creative Writing Workshop with Dr Roxani Krystalli, held during the second weekend of light art at the St Andrews Botanic Garden. This week, our focus shifts towards nature and art, the organic and the digital.

This two-hour writing workshop will invite participants to engage with the St Andrews Botanic Garden through the senses and through encounters with art, beauty, flourishing, light, and loss. The workshop will include prompts for reflection and writing, opportunities to share with other participants, close reading of key nature writing texts to inspire future writing, and questions to take home for further development. The workshop is open to writers at all levels – beginners very welcome! Participants are not required to have a work-in-progress to attend.

This week Studio Lemercier, our artists-in-residence, present their light installation Prairie. By illuminating live plants, the installation culminates in an enchanting experience that explores new imaginaries and perspectives on nature and art. Similar themes are addressed by Dan Drage’s sculptural works. Whereas some can be spotted from afar, his Pit and Mount and Sleeping Log almost elude the eye as the natural world has reclaimed the space, blurring the lines between what is nature, and what is culture. The works are an invitation to question those boundaries, and venture through the garden with a perspective that is open to finding art as entangled with nature in sometimes unexpected places.

Dr Roxani Krystalli is an academic, peacebuilder and storyteller. The central question to her work is: what sustains life in the wake of loss? For over a decade, she has worked as a professional in the fields of humanitarian action, peacebuilding and transitional justice. She remains engaged in this work alongside current pursuits as a feminist academic, researcher and teacher at the University of St Andrews. She is also a writer and storyteller, interested in the themes of memory, attention, place and care.

This workshop will involve some light movement around the St Andrews Botanic Garden, so we encourage participants to read the and to get in touch if there are any specific access needs.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

St Andrews Botanic Garden, Canongate, St Andrews, United Kingdom