TIDESPACE focus for Spring, both the exhibition and the authors talks, is on those with a defining relationship with the land. TIDESPACE exhibition features the work of artist Michael Johnson who has created a radical body of work outside in direct response to the Dumfries & Galloway landscape.  TIDESPACE TALKS is series of talks relating to those with the most defining relationship with the land of all, farmers. TIDESPACE will be talking to Writer-In-Residence Bella Bathurst and Farmer Authors; Jamie Blackett with David & Wilma Finlay and then Patrick Laurie, all from Dumfries & Galloway. 
Almost 70 percent of land in the UK is farmland. Since Neolithic times, when our species stopped hunting and gathering, farming became the most essential role. In modern society the few remaining people with the most necessarily significant relationship, knowledge and impact  on the land, frequently for generations, are farmers.

TIDESPACE TALKS LAND series starts with a conversation with TIDESPACE Writer In Residence Bella Bathurst. Her acute first hand observations on a contemporary farm, of the significant changes in relationships between one generation to the next and with and within the same land in her book FIELD WORKS - What Land Does To People & What People Do To Land  makes a very significant read.

Following on from this, TIDESPACE will be talking directly to recently published Farmer Authors, all specifically from Dumfries & Galloway; David & Wilma Finlay, Jamie Blackett and Patrick Laurie.

Historically the region’s most famous Farmer Author, Robert Burns, contributed to perhaps the most romanticised and respected perception of farming and farmers. However the current generation of farmers are frequently vilified.

As local farmers they reflect a wider experience of radical global and national changes in; economics, politics, technology, and society. The significant shifts in the perception and the reality of farming means in the course of one generation, farmers relationship to the natural world has changed dramatically. The consequences on the land, plant and animal life, and food derived from it, affects everyone.

Author Farmers David & Wilma Finlay, Jamie Blackett and Patrick Laurie, will be talking about what led them to farm and what leads them to write. All write about their personal experiences with their own particular voices. Each have different and parallel perspectives on the enormous changes and challenges affecting farmers, the land, and the natural world.