A Fragile Correspondence – Ravenscraig | Motherwell, June 10th 2025
A special outdoor event (co-funded by Lanarkshire Climate Action Hub and NLC Arts Development) was held at Ravenscraig as part of the Architecture Fringe 2025, where art, memory and landscape converged in a powerful public moment. The evening featured an artist-led Artwalk with Tine Collective (Frank McElhinney & Hamshya Rajkumar), followed by an open-air screening of Boundary Layers by Amanda Thomson. Taking place on the site of the former steelworks, the event reconnected the work of A Fragile Correspondence to the community and environment that inspired it.
A Fragile Correspondence was commissioned by the Scotland + Venice partnership as Scotland’s official contribution to the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023. The exhibition explored relationships between people, land and language across three distinct Scottish locations: Ravenscraig (the Lowlands), Loch Ness (the Highlands), and Orkney (the Islands). The Ravenscraig strand was developed in partnership with North Lanarkshire Council Arts, with Ann Louise Kieran (Visual Arts Development Officer) playing a central role in shaping and communicating the project locally.
The creative team for Ravenscraig featured:
- Artists: Dr. Amanda Thomson, Tine Collective (Frank McElhinney & Hamshya Rajkumar)
- Curators: Architecture Fringe (Andy Summers & Neil McGuire)
All three artists are based in or connected to North Lanarkshire and each brought a personal and artistic response to the Ravenscraig site – once the largest steelworks in Western Europe, now a shifting landscape of ecological regeneration and layered history.
Within the Venice exhibition (20 May – 26 November 2023), Ravenscraig was presented as a place often seen as ‘somewhere and nowhere’ – a post-industrial void now undergoing a slow transformation. Visitors were invited to view it as a living, resurgent landscape where memory, industry and natural regrowth intersect. The exhibition attracted over 15,000 visitors, with 100% recommending it in exit surveys – underscoring its resonance and impact.
Events & Community Engagement: 2023–2025
- April 2023 – A pre-Venice community event was held at the North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre, featuring presentations from the artists and curators, film screenings, and a reading by former Ravenscraig steelworker Martin Brown from his short story collection. This gathering rooted the project in the lived experiences of the local community.
- September 7 – October 28, 2024 – After its Venice debut, the Ravenscraig part of A Fragile Correspondence returned to Scotland for a dedicated exhibition at the North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre in Motherwell, reconnecting the work with local audiences.
- September 19, 2024 – an artist’s talk hosted at the Heritage Centre allowed visitors to hear directly from the creative team about the themes of the exhibition – industrial legacy, sustainability, memory and landscape.
- November 2024 – The full exhibition was restaged at V&A Dundee, extending its reach and re-engaging national audiences with Scotland’s contemporary architectural and cultural narratives Scotland + Venice: A Fragile Correspondence
- June 10, 2025 – As part of Architecture Fringe 2025, the following event…the Ravenscraig Artwalk and Outdoor Screening of ‘Boundary Layers’ brought the project directly back into the landscape. Led by Tine Collective and writer/artist, Amanda Thomson, the event merged art, walking, community and storytelling in an immersive public setting.
Through three years of creative activity, A Fragile Correspondence has become more than an international exhibition. It is a story of place, transformation and the power of artistic response. And as a lasting legacy, the film which records the event at Ravenscraig on June 10th, captures one chapter of that journey, grounded in the land where the project began. Please watch and enjoy!