Shetland Arts are delighted to announce the successful applicants from the Autumn round of VACMA for 2025/26.
The Visual Artist and Craft Maker Awards (VACMA) are a programme of small grant schemes delivered in partnership with a range of local authorities and art organisations across Scotland. The schemes are managed locally by these partners. VACMA offers fixed bursaries of £500 and £1,000. The purpose of these bursaries is to support visual artists and craft makers in their creative and professional development.
During this latest round, we had 5 successful applicants:
Coleen Thomson
Kirstie Clubb
Lydia Hann
Meilo So
Diana Winfield
You can find out more about these artists and their projects below.
Applications for VACMA's Winter deadline (3 February 2026) are now open. Find out more here.
Collen Thomson
Colleen plans to attend training in Glasgow with Vanilla Ink Studios, to learn how to create jewellery designs using wax carving & learn the art of sand casting, in order to further develop her current jewellery-making skills.
Kirstie Clubb
Kirstie's project involves recovering and experimenting with an undiscovered archive of up to 100 analogue family films. The films will be developed by herself, with mentorship from local expert Chris Smith, rebuilding an analogue workflow for her documentary practice through hands-on, experimental film development and creative processing.
Lydia Hann
Lydia plans to undergo training in Stoll industrial knitting machine programming to elevate her craft practice. Incorporating digital-aided knitting will open up larger-scale outcomes and tools to fuse heritage and futuristic perspectives.
Meilo So
Meilo will paint ten scenes from the Shetland folktale Jan Tait and the Bear. Following an exhibition of the paintings, she will then collaborate with filmmakers to turn these into an animated film.
Diana Winfield
Diana is an artist with a brain-based visual impairment. Her creative process starts with taking photographs of what makes her feel inspired, before taking these photographs and create paintings or drawings from them. The work she makes explores colours, shapes and patterns, often focusing on smaller sections of objects and nature.
