BUSS O GRESS / TUFT OF GRASS

Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney
August – September 2025

The exhibition featured Rebecca Marr’s photographs and Valerie Gillies’ poems about wild grasses and their uses.
With a commissioned wall installation by Royal Academician artist Frances Pelly based on the idea of St Brigid’s Cross, alongside work responding to Angus MacPhee, Weaver of Grass, by Joanne B Kaar.
With grass artefacts from Orkney Museums and Magnus Spence herbarium sheets from Stromness Museum collection. Film of tradition bearer Neil Leask weaving a Craa’s foot by Mark Jenkins.
The exhibition included a library of the artist’s grass related books.

The exhibition was supported by The National Lottery through Creative Scotland.


You can hear Valerie reading some of the poems in the exhibition here.

Previous exhibitions

2023 Grass photograms were shown as part of Portraits of Nature curated by Magdalena Choluj at Northlight Gallery, Stromness.
More here

2022-2023 Holy-grass photographs and poems were shown at Dunnet Bay Distillery in an exhibition about the baking botanist Robert Dick who rediscovered Holy-grass (Hierochloe odorata) on the banks of the Thurso River.