Singing the Fishing presents ongoing doctoral research in architectural design that explores how oral knowledge can be used to write alternative architectural and landscape histories.

The work centres around the Herring Girls — migrant women who followed the migrating herring shoals from the Scottish Highlands and Islands down Britain’s East Coast to gut and pack in the 19th to the mid-20th century. As migrant, working-class women, the Herring Girls have been historically marginalised in national and architectural archives. Working with the folk songs and traditional music of these women, Singing the Fishing works to surface their histories and reimagine this landscape through song, voice, and movement to write this architectural history.

Drawing on recent fieldwork undertaken in the Outer Hebrides and Orkney Isles, this exhibition brings together sound, image, and text gathered during residencies with Sail Britain and Piers Arts Centre. These journeys northwards trace the rhythms of migration, sea, and memory through artistic audio-visual responses - an unfolding methodology developed with site-responsive and archival work.

Between Land and Sea — Fieldwork in the Outer Hebrides and Orkney Isles

In the summer of 2025, two research journeys were undertaken to the Isle of Lewis and Harris, and to the Orkney Isles. Both were facilitated by artist residencies: Muir is Tir (Between Land and Sea) with Sail Britain, and Linkshouse with the Piers Arts Centre in Birsay.

Working on the rocks in the intertidal zones where Herring Girls would have worked gutting and packing fish away from formal harbours, these cyanotype prints were produced under the waves and on the rocks as an alternative mapping methodology.

Still from Direct Animation Films on 16mm lidar of historic herring sites, shown with field recordings taken in the Outer Hebrides and Orkney Isles

THE HERRING GIRLS

Nyima Murry