Katie Harris-MacLeod is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves between art, ecology, and embodied forms of knowledge. Working across performance, material processes, sound, moving image, and site-responsive installation, she engages with the porous boundaries between body, land, and memory.

MacLeod’s work is deeply connected to nature, the psychogeography of place, ecofeminist thought, and the symbiotic entanglements experienced throughout the life cycle. Nuances of folklore, intergenerational narratives, femininity, loss, and isolation are present throughout her work. These provocations emerge through a poetic dialogue between body and landscape—an exchange enacted through performance, materiality, and what she calls a “practice of the wild”. Her work explores the fluid edges of belonging, tracing a transitory relationship to place and self.

Her practice is grounded in embodied experience, investigating the intersections between personal trauma, ecological systems, and material transformation. Informed by lived experience of family violence, her work considers how patterns of domination enacted upon women and children are mirrored in the exploitation of the natural world. Through this lens, bodily and ecological violence are understood as interconnected forms of rupture, each leaving traces on bodies, landscapes, and collective memory.

MacLeod graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), Dundee, Scotland, in 2017 with a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice. During her studies, she received a bursary for the Erasmus Exchange Programme at École européenne supérieure d'art de Bretagne (EESAB), Quimper, France, where her work was exhibited in the Bilan exhibition and she facilitated workshops in local primary schools. Following graduation, she undertook a mentorship and residency on the Muir is Tìr | Land and Sea sailing residency, funded by SAIL BRITAIN and AN LANNTAIR, sailing across the Minch with a cohort of artists to develop site-responsive work and deliver talks to rural Hebridean communities.

MacLeod has lived and worked across the Hebrides and the rural Highlands of Argyll, each landscape forming a palimpsest of memory and time. She has exhibited throughout Europe and Australia, and undertaken international study tours and residencies across Scotland, Ireland, France, and South East Queensland. Since late 2019, she has been based on Kabi Kabi Country / the Sunshine Coast, where she has exhibited and collaborated extensively across the region.

In 2026, MacLeod was awarded Overall Winner of the 40 Under 40 Exhibition and Art Prize, and undertook a residency at Q Bank Gallery in Queenstown, Lutruwita / Tasmania. Responding to the Queen River and the environmental legacy of copper mining, she developed a new body of site-responsive work through walking, collecting, drawing, and material experimentation, working with toxic river sediment, copper oxide inks, cyanotype, and wool soaked in the river. The resulting work extends her ongoing investigation into ecological grief, ecological intimacy, and the layered histories held within landscapes.

MacLeod is currently undertaking the R|Artist Residency: Natural Ecologies with Sunshine Coast Council and the University of the Sunshine Coast. Through this residency, she is developing Tree Ear, a speculative listening environment emerging from sustained research in the Noosa Everglades and Wallum landscapes. Combining sculpture, sound, moving image, drawing, and material traces gathered from threatened environments, the project explores ecological time, listening, technological translation, and the changing relationships between humans and more-than-human worlds. The residency marks an ongoing expansion of MacLeod’s practice into sound, digital fabrication, ecological research, and collaborative modes of knowledge-making.

Key words: Ecological grief, Ecological intimacy, Ecology, Conceptual Art, Site-Specific, Interdisciplinary, Narrative, Culture, Folklore, Human memory in terrain, Psychogeography, Collaboration, Ecofeminism, Inter-woven, Land-Art, Activism, Performance, Sound, Materiality, Language.