Sara, 95, photographed at her home in Eddleston. Too often referred to as the famous scientist who cloned Dolly the Sheep Sir Ian Wilmut’s second wife.

Anna, runs her own semiconductor recruitment company, a largely male dominated sector. Photographed in her co-working space in Lauder, she grew up in Selkirk and now lives in Galashiels.

women of the scottish borders - a work in progress

I returned to Scotland in October 2024 — a native coming home, but new to the Borders. I arrived with my camera and an open question: what does it mean to be a woman in this landscape, in this particular convergence of rural tradition, post-industrial memory and quiet resilience?

The Scottish Borders has its own distinct character shaped by the textile mills that once defined its towns, by farming communities with deep roots, by a geography that can feel both intimate and isolating. Women have been central to all of it: as weavers and mill workers, as farmers and mothers, as the keepers of local knowledge and community life. And yet, as in so many cultures, their work has been overlooked, their stories pushed to the margins of the official record.

This project is my attempt to look more carefully. Working with portraiture and documentary photography, I am making pictures of women across the region in their homes, their workplaces, their landscapes and gathering the stories that surround those images. I am interested in the everyday and the extraordinary in equal measure: the woman who has farmed the same land for forty years, the one who arrived here from elsewhere and made it home, the one whose labour sustained a community that never thought to thank her.

I am also, still, an outsider learning this place. That position of attentive newcomer feels important to the work, a reminder that seeing clearly sometimes requires not taking anything for granted.

Innerleithen based textile artist Margaret Maran, standing in front of her work at a recent exhibition in Hawick.