The North Coast 500 was launched in 2015 as a road trip route to bring tourism to the Highlands of Scotland. It draws together disparate places into a coherent ‘line’ through the landscape, marketed on a romanticised conception of the Highlands as a land of misty glens, dramatic coastlines and picturesque scenery. 

Working at the text/textile interface, Knitting the North Coast 500 represents the NC500 at a 1:200,000 scale and makes visible the route as a narrative construct. Just as the NC500 marketing narrative knits together a rhetoric of romanticism with disparate landscape elements into one coherent ‘line’ or route around the Highlands, so this piece knits together threads to form a cohesive whole. 

This work was originally exhibited as a performance piece, with the process of knitting captured over a series of sittings, before the piece was then unravelled in a deliberate act of destruction.