ABOUT CAIRN
Cairn Creative Lab is a gathering place for understanding, nurturing, and reclaiming artistic practice, a way to grasp the world around us, to question it, and to reveal the mark we leave upon it.
Cairn Creative Lab is conceived as a site for the critical reactivation of artistic practice as a mode of knowledge production. Drawing is positioned not as a representational end, but as a situated process through which perception, thought, and environment are negotiated. Within this framework, the drawn line operates as both trace and inquiry, registering the conditions of presence, duration, and attention.
Founded by artist Rebeca Font, Cairn originated in 2012 as a workshop in the Ribera neighbourhood of Barcelona. In 2025, the project was re-situated within a rural context in the Scottish Highlands, in the region of Moray. This geographical shift marks a conceptual reorientation towards landscape as an active agent in the formation of artistic practice, foregrounding the reciprocal relationship between body, gesture, and territory.
With drawing as its central axis, Cairn functions as a laboratory for research-based artistic practice. It proposes the act of drawing as a means of cognition and articulation, enabling processes of observation, translation, and critical reflection. Operating within a natural environment, Cairn articulates the human not as an external observer of landscape, but as a constituent element within an ecological continuum.
ABOUT REBECA FONT
She is an artist, architect and lecturer from Barcelona, currently based in Forres, Scotland. She holds a PhD in Art from Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, and a degree in Architecture from ETSAB – Barcelona School of Architecture.
Her artistic practice encompasses visual artworks, projections and performances that interweave drawing, calligraphy and language, extending into new technologies such as motion capture. Her research explores drawing and its relationship to the body, the environment and language, understood as a form of communication, interpretation and development. She has led workshops, collective experiences and talks on spatial perception and understanding through drawing, and lectures on undergraduate and postgraduate Design programmes in the areas of Art, Space Design and Graphic Design.
In 2017, her artistic research focused on the relationship between environmental design and drawing as a tool for sensitive mapping. This work was presented as a paper, lecture and workshop at the Cumulus Conference in Bengaluru, India, under the title Environmental Design: Drawing as Sensitive Mapping, exploring drawing as a means of interpreting territories from a perceptual and experiential perspective. In 2020, her focus shifted towards science communication and co-creation. With Visualising the Invisible. Co-Creation Workshop to Develop New Scientific Narratives, she delivered a talk and workshop at the Chromdesign Conference (Elisava, Barcelona), addressing the visualisation of the invisible and the collaborative construction of new scientific narratives. In 2023, her research deepened into the dialogue between drawing and calligraphy through the thought of Su Shi. Two complementary works were published and presented: the article Drawing Facing Calligraphy: Surface, Subject and Su Shi (Journal of Visual Art Practice, Routledge) and the paper Drawing Meeting Calligraphy at the First Hainan Summit on Tungpo Culture (Hainan University, China). In 2024, she completed and presented her doctoral thesis, The Multiplicities of Drawing: An Investigation through Practice.
In 2014, she exhibited Terra i Guerra. El Vallés 1705–1714 at the Museu d’Art de Granollers, Barcelona. In 2015, she developed the concept art for Anatoly Marchenko as part of The Lives of Dissidents. In 2018, she presented the performance Biface Graphy with Prof. Zhang Qiang at Tate Modern, London. That same year, she produced the drawings for Edouard Cabay’s Automatic Drawing and Mechanic Drawing for exhibitions at Centre d’Art Santa Mònica and Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, Barcelona.
In the field of theatre, between 2018 and 2024 she created drawings, stage design and costume design for Rumbo a mí (Teatre Porta 4, Barcelona), El millor pels nostres fills (Teatre Tantarantana, Barcelona) and La ligereza de la incertidumbre (La Farinera del Clot, Barcelona).
Her architecture studio, Projectes Zoom, was active from 2003 to 2022.
She currently continues her research through artistic practice, while preparing a new exhibition and further developing Cairn Creative Lab.
