NAARCA Residency Exchange: Christina Riley

In March, Scottish-American artist Christina Riley arrived at the Saari Residence through the NAARCA network’s residency exchange programme. She will be in residence from 23 March to 20 April and will also lead two workshops for fellow resident artists during her stay.

NAARCA (The Nordic Alliance of Artists’ Residencies on Climate Action) is an international collaborative network that brings together artists’ residencies from the Nordic region and beyond to collaborate on research, commissions, institutional change, residency exchanges, and education on climate action. The network explores the climate crisis and biodiversity loss through artistic practices while promoting sustainability across ecological, social, psychological and cultural dimensions. In 2026, residency exchanges will take place between March and November at Cove Park (Scotland), Saari Residence (Finland), and Skaftfell Arts Center (Iceland).

During her residency at Saari Residence, Christina Riley focuses on the residency’s ecological library, exploring it as a space for knowledge-sharing and encounter.

“As a NAARCA resident, I plan to think about the library as a celebratory and contemporary symbol of progress, not financial or economic, but an alternative kind of growth that sustains society in the longer term. I’m interested in looking at how communities gather and share information and, inspired by Saari’s non-human neighbours, will consider other displays of knowledge gathering and sharing throughout the natural world.”

Christina Riley (b. 1988, Miami) is a Scottish-American artist based in Ayrshire. Founder of The Nature Library and author of Looking Down at the Stars: Life Beneath the Waves (Saraband, 2025), she works across photography, writing and installation to consider the stories told of and by the natural world, as well as the value of, and access to, these stories in times of climate, cost of living and misinformation crises.

Longlisted for Canongate’s Nan Shepherd Prize for Underrepresented Voices in Nature Writing and a Save Our Seas Ocean Storytelling Finalist, her essays have appeared in Gutter, Extra Teeth, Little Toller and Caught by the River, among other publications.

Recent exhibitions include: Texas Photographic Society International Competition, Center for Contemporary Art, Abilene (2025); Beneath the Waves, Scottish Maritime Museum, Irvine (2025); Argyll Hope Spot Retrospective, Rockfield Centre, Oban (2025); Quota, Art Walk Porty, Edinburgh (2023). She has been an underwater artist-in-residence at the Argyll Hope Spot and Environmentalist-in-Residence with West Dunbartonshire Libraries. Her photo book” The Beach” was published by Guillemot Press in 2021, and in 2025, she released her self-published artist’s book,” An Index of the Colour of Water”.