Invisible lines, fragmented time – Laura Derby, Kayleigh Sarah McGuinness, Christine Goodman and Fiona Stewart

Invisible lines, fragmented time is this year’s cross estate exhibition at Inverness Creative Academy, featuring work from four artists based at different Wasps locations across Scotland. The purpose of the cross estate exhibitions is to foster connections between artists across the network, with curatorial support from the Arts Programme Manager to produce the project.

This exhibition brings together four artists whose practices converge around memory, materiality, and the hidden connections that shape our lives. Though working in different mediums (textiles, printmaking, painting, sculpture, and assemblage) each artist explores the fragile intersections of time, place, and human experience.

• Laura Derby translates resilience and storytelling into hand-tufted wool rugs, fusing art and functionality through tactile, sculptural surfaces that hold echoes of heritage and landscape.
• Christine creates prints in muted tones and monochrome, layering stillness and shadow to shift the atmosphere of a space and invite quiet contemplation.
• Kayleigh Sarah McGuinness works in rope, brass, stone, and steel, embedding physical energy into sculptural gestures that trace ancestral memory and overlooked histories.
• Fiona Stewart draws on natural decay and discarded fragments in paintings and assemblages, weaving theatre and narrative into evocations of forgotten environments.

Together, their works form a dialogue of fragmented moments and invisible lines, threads that bind past to present, resilience to fragility, and imagination to lived experience. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how memory, material, and making can connect us across time and space.

Christine Goodman is a painter and printmaker who studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee and graduated with BA Hons and Masters in Fine art. She has exhibited in Perth, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and London and internationally in Brazil, Sweden and Lithuania. She currently works part time as an artist in the Centre for Brain Injury, Dundee; facilitating creative process for patient rehabilitation and has also delivered creative workshops for Art in Hospital at St Andrews Community Hospital, Fife. Christine’s current work concerns juxtapositions of visual elements through combining monochrome and muted colour, to produce individual series of prints. These can subtly influence a space they inhabit through imbuing stillness, sensual lightness and shadow.

Laura Derby is a textile artist who creates one off, hand crafted wool pile textile rugs to her own design and to commission. The hand tufting technique allows Laura to paint and sculpt with wool to fuse artistic expression with functionality. Based in the rural Artist’s Town of Kirkcudbright her work bridges art, nature, human connection and is infused with themes of resilience, connection, and a sense of storytelling, reinforcing the importance of craft as a bridge between past and future. To help sustain her small craft business Laura also sells prints of her one off works, as exhibited here. Some are of her own designs and some are collaborations with commissions she has made.

Kayleigh Sarah McGuinness is a Glasgow-based visual artist whose sculptural practice explores women’s heritage, ancestral memory, and material traditions. Invisible lines, fragmented time highlights the physical energy embedded in her making process, from manipulating brass and stone to the large rope forms that connect and divide space. Through these material gestures, McGuinness traces hidden connections across time, revealing the resilience and fragility of overlooked histories. Recent projects include a permanent steel sculpture for Glasgow’s Tron Steeple, commissioned as part of the city’s 850th celebrations.

Fiona Stewart is a multidisciplinary artist based in Inverness. Her work navigates memory, time, and place through painting and assemblage, often blurring the lines between reality and imagination. Influenced by natural decay, discarded materials and forgotten environments, she creates emotionally charged works that evoke the remnants of lived experience and the quiet resilience of the natural world. Trained in Theatre Design at Edinburgh College of Art and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Stewart weaves atmosphere and narrative into her visual work, echoing her background in theatre design. She has exhibited across the UK, including the Royal Scottish Academy, and has been shortlisted for the John Byrne Award and the Canal Boat Miniature Painting Prize. She is a gallery artist with the Lido Stores in Margate and the Lilford Gallery in Canterbury.