The five-year Connecting Threads project is a unique place-making initiative that connects creatives across all art forms with conservationists, environmentalists, scientists, river specialists and communities of place and purpose, celebrating the River Tweed through a programme of cultural activity.
Rebecca, based in Nottingham, and Savinder, based in Hitchin, work across art forms and disciplines including film, textiles, gatherings, sound, sculpture, installation, and socially engaged practice. Their fully-funded Connecting Threads residencies will enable them to pursue a range of creative and research areas in response to the River Tweed and the Connecting Threads 2026 programming theme, ‘Under, over, round and through’.
Their work will be publicly shared at Connecting Threads’ second Tweed River Festival which takes place in Melrose on 30-31 October, 2026.
River Culture Curator Tiki Muir says:
“We are thrilled to welcome Rebecca Beinart and Savinder Bual as our artists in residence for 2026. Both artists have rich practices and knowledge of collaborations with water, rivers, place and people. The residencies are paid and supported opportunities for creative practitioners with socially and environmentally engaged practices to spend time along the River Tweed and respond to its unique ecologies and culture – nourishing and strengthening the vibrant creative activity and connections across the region. Each residency is an opportunity to meet the Tweed anew, and I am excited to share and learn alongside these artists.”
During the residency, Rebecca will be exploring the river’s source. She will engage with the porous boundaries where wetness and land overlap, attending to ideas of seepage and permeability across bodies, peat, moss, and plant and animal communities – and how this helps us better understand the complex ecological relationships we are part of.
Savinder is interested in how listening to water invites a deep form of presence and attention. Through a series of community workshops, she plans to make soundscapes with experimental instruments through which river water will flow, recruiting the Tweed as live collaborator. She also brings an interest in the 12th century hydraulic systems used by the Melrose Abbey monks to siphon water from the River Tweed.
Connecting Threads are also commissioning writers to respond to the residents’ work. The resulting texts will be published in a book, shared at the Tweed River Festival, and online at www.tweedriverculture.org later in the year. Please find our full announcement here.
About the residencies
The artists in residence were selected through a two-stage open call. The process was designed to minimise the amount of unpaid labour that artists are asked to undertake when applying for professional opportunities. The first stage, an expression of interest, saw over ninety eligible applications. Following this initial stage, the Connecting Threads programming team paid six artists to put together more detailed residency proposals. Connecting Threads worked with artists Jade de Montserrat and Harun Morrison as panellists to select the final residency artists.
The residencies have just begun in July with initial Encounters Days welcoming the artists, inviting them to spend time with the Connecting Threads team in Newstead and Melrose along the River Tweed. This involves the two artists living and working together – encountering each other, the Tweed’s landscape, its communities, and new perspectives, grounding their approach to the residency in the River Tweed.
Thereafter, the artists will undertake the residency on four ten-day blocks, from now until October. During this time each artist will develop work to share during the Tweed River Festival, 30-31 October.
2026 theme: Under, over, round and through
These residencies form a key strand in Connecting Threads’ 2026 programme, under the theme ‘Under, over, round and through’ – which will also be the theme of the Tweed River Festival this year.
Throughout 2026, Connecting Threads are inviting artists and communities to navigate connections between the river, our minds, bodies and communities across a multitude of scales. The programme title is borrowed from group dance warm-ups that encourage participants to focus on their relationships to the surrounding space and to each other.
This year, Connecting Threads explores questions such as: how can paying attention to complex networks of micro and macro relations help us to navigate the river as a shared space for many beings with their own ways of connecting with each other? What might change when we understand every body – bacteria, plant, human, river – as a collective?
Connecting Threads run a series of annual residencies, bringing socially and environmentally engaged artists to the River Tweed. Residencies may be focused on research or production, embedded in a community or river-related organisation. Previous
Connecting Threads artists in residence include: Anna Chapman Parker, Emily Cropton, Georgie Fay, Sam Gillespie, Jessie Growden, and Miwa Nagato-Apthorp (all 2025); Sam Laughlin, Coleman and Hodges, and Annie Lord (all 2024); Saul Pankhurst (2023); and Jules Bradbury (2021).