CONTACT is a new solo exhibition by Jess Holdengarde, University Artist in Residence 2025–26, presented by the University of Stirling Art Collection. Through a series of silver gelatin prints alongside extracts from an ongoing 16mm film, the exhibition explores the embodied, in-process experience of making contact—with lenses, light, water, landscape, and Scotland’s climate innovation projects—and how these encounters have shaped the process of image-making.

Developed during Holdengarde’s year-long residency at Stirling, CONTACT emerges from an evolving body of research that sits between artistic practice, climate research, and scientific enquiry. The exhibition acts as a companion and in-process body of work to her forthcoming FORTH2O-funded 16mm film, revealing the still images, material traces, and quieter moments that have emerged throughout the artist’s residency and filmmaking process. The new film work has been funded by policy innovation partnership FORTH2O, supported by Hydro Nation researchers and mentored by LUX Scotland, and will premiere with the University in 2027.

Rather than presenting finished outcomes, CONTACT offers a sense of steadiness within this ongoing research. The exhibition dwells in the spaces where things are captured, recorded, and brought into contact with one another: tactile encounters, experiments, and observations that shape the artist’s relationship with photography, filmmaking, and the landscapes in which they and their film crew have worked.

Throughout CONTACT, photography becomes a point of stillness amidst the shifting states of water, light, and moving image. These grounded moments reveal spaces where the darkroom, filmmaking, scientific research, and the artist’s desire to foreground the urgency of climate innovation coexist. It is a place where materiality and feeling intersect; where lenses, landscapes, and climate enquiry become intertwined; and where acts of looking become methods for understanding the world through curiosity, interdisciplinary exchange, and connection. This exhibition marks the first time Holdengarde has explored a more documentary approach within her photography and filmmaking, using this shift in practice to attend closely to the people, processes, and landscapes encountered throughout the research.

Acknowledgements

To my crew — Jamie Quantrall, Chloe Charlton, Robbie Thomson, Myriam Mouflih and Daniel Hughes — for all their support thus far in the film development. To FORTH2O and the University of Stirling Art Collection for their support throughout the development and production of this work. To Lux Scotland for their mentorship. To Stills Centre for Photography, who supported the production of the photographic elements of this work, and Evan Thomas for his technical skills and input. And to the many people who have supported me throughout the last year — thank you.

Supported by Stills Centre for Photography, Cinelab UK, Scotland Hydro Nation Chair, Lux Scotland and FORTH2O. Framing by Rabbet Framing.