RSA Kinross Scholarship | Florence 2016

The Royal Scottish Academy John Kinross Scholarship is awarded to graduating artists and architecture students from select Scottish schools, funding a period of self-led study in Florence for approximately one month. Using this award, I travelled to Italy in July 2016 to develop my own practice, with a view to mapping the City and its context by continuing the themes and techniques of my MArch thesis work.

During this month away, I made the most of the opportunity to visit many of the surrounding towns and villages, in addition to travelling to see exhibitions in Rome and Venice. I was intrigued by the artists and architects who have worked from Florence throughout history – from Michelangelo to Superstudio. Highlights of the scholarship included touring the marble quarries of Carrara and seeing the integration of contemporary architecture into Brunelleschi’s Hospital of the Innocents.

My resulting work explores the materiality of the city, imagining it as a field of marble objects carved out of the mountains. I produced a series of models representing the forms of various buildings – including the Baptistery, Campanile and the twentieth century Palazzina Reale – as imprints into the quarries. These models were presented to the RSA at the end of January 2017.