Carole McCourt

My practice is grounded in walking, close observation, and long-term engagement with place. Working primarily with drawing, printmaking, photography, and site-responsive processes, I attend to geology, landscape, and material presence through slowness and repetition. Rather than treating land as a subject to be represented, I work with places over time, allowing duration, resistance, and environmental conditions to shape how the work develops. I am interested in how careful, sustained attention can open different ways of knowing land, and how art can operate as a form of ethical, non-extractive engagement with the more-than-human world.

My practice has developed through long-term engagement with place, walking, and material processes, shaped by professional reinvention and lived experience. I originally trained as a printmaker before spending many years working in data and technology, a period that sharpened my awareness of systems, limits, and abstraction. Relocating to the North Pennines marked a turning point, reorienting my life and work around landscape, geology, and duration.

Living and working in a remote rural environment has deepened my attentiveness to land, weather, and material presence, with walking becoming central to how I think, make, and research. Experiences of illness and recovery further altered my relationship to time, endurance, and care, reinforcing a commitment to slow, attentive, and ethically grounded ways of working. These experiences continue to inform a practice focused on staying with places over time and allowing them to shape both process and understanding.