PUBLICATIONS

I have been lucky enough to have had very beautiful books and an online essay published in collaboration with some of the best poets and writers in Scotland, Ireland and beyond, of which the following is a selection:

Such Fragile Futures: An Artist and a Poet Reflect in a Garden

Published by Main Point Books, Edinburgh (2025)

Dr Neil’s Garden in Edinburgh is an urban haven, a place that has something to tell us about all places. With delicacy and tender attention, artist Brigid Collins and poet Christine De Luca respond to the garden, looking deeply into how it feeds a vital and growing sensitivity towards our fragile futures.

With a shared vision, technical finesse and grace of expression, Christine De Luca and Brigid Collins evoke a sense of the unique nature of Dr Neil’s Garden, confirming the imagination and philosophy behind its creation.

—Stewart Conn, poet and Edinburgh city’s inaugural Makar

If we allow ourselves, we can slip into slow time and experience the world from a different perspective. This beautiful book transports us to a different mode of being through which we can feel part of something much bigger than ourselves.

—Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well-Gardened Mind

Imbued with care and attention, this book conjures a particular landscape of spirit and earth. Both artist and poet express a reverence for the unknowable with humility and tenderness.

—Dr Kitty Wheater, Mindfulness Chaplain at the University of Edinburgh

Review of Such Fragile Futures

“…the mix of art and poetry is powerful. The natural world adds potency”

Sally McDonald in The Sunday Post (October, 2025)

Read the full review here »

Copies of Such Fragile Futures: An Artist and a Poet Reflect in a Garden are available directly from the publisher, Main Point Books @ £15.00 + P&P

Purchase here »

Read more about Such Fragile Futures here »

Of Mutual Things: Observations in Four Parts

By Dr. Kitty Wheater
Published by Main Point Books, Edinburgh (2026)

Artist Brigid Collins and poet Christine De Luca have a key question:

Can artistic practice – product or process – reveal spiritual reality? 

In this pocket-sized companion booklet to Such Fragile Futures: An Artist and a Poet Reflect in a Garden, Dr Kitty Wheater explores the artistry of Collins and De Luca and meditates on the themes of restoration in the natural world, connection through creative practice and the transformative power of awe.

‘In Brigid and Christine’s work, there were conversations that took place between artist and poet, but also between both and the garden. The shift I observe is, as both artist and poet posit, from separation to mutuality; but what I will draw out too is the ways in which that mutuality retains vital distinctions between plants, between plants and humans, and between garden and representation.

It is in this mutual distinctiveness, a fractal configuration of connection and distinction, that we find a certain kind of spiritual reality: a sacred geometry sensed only by those who seek.’

Dr Kitty Wheater is a mindfulness practitioner, anthropologist and writer.
She is the Mindfulness Chaplain at the University of Edinburgh.

Copies of Of Mutual Things: Observations in Four Parts are available directly from the publisher, Main Point Books @ £4.00 + P&P

Purchase here »

Frissure
Collection of artworks and prose poems, in collaboration with poet Kathleen Jamie. Published by Birlinn (Polygon), Edinburgh (2013).

“At first I tried to write ‘poems’ but the tone was all wrong. Too smart, too concluded. A looser weave was required, something thready, gauzy, that could be unpicked. Thready? Gauzy? Brigid’s work was having its effect on me. So, I wrote a few lines from notes I’d made when I was recovering. It seemed that they were falling into themes, though the themes blended into each other. Healing, certainly. Mortality, of course. The idea of the gift. Intimacy. The natural world. The notion of the line. Memory and heredity. All had arisen during my treatment and recovery, but none was strictly medical. In Brigid’s work the texts are not repeated whole, but as fragments, fugitive.”

– Kathleen Jamie, in Frissure (Polygon, 2013)

Collins, B. and Jamie, K., Frissure. Essay.
Published in Granta Magazine, London, UK (2012).
Available: https://granta.com/frissure/

For A’ That
Booker Prize-winning author DBC Pierre is among the contributors to a book celebrating the life of Robert Burns, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Scotland’s national poet. The words of Robert Burns, poet and artist, have crossed the decades, the centuries and the globe, meaning something different to every one of us. The University of Dundee especially commissioned writers from around the world to converge upon the pages of a unique anthology – DBC Pierre, Janice Galloway, Bill Manhire and Kirsty Gunn – as well as national stars of the literary world –Jim Stewart, Stewart Crossley and the late Gavin Wallace – and some of the best lesser-known literary names to celebrate a great life well and truly lived by Scotland’s best-known literary figure. In addition, a folio of stunning original artwork was created exclusively for the book, by Brigid Collins and is here brought together in an exciting book design by Tim Bremner.
Published by The University of Dundee Press (2009).

a place where thought happens…
Limited edition (500) Artist’s Book, in collaboration with poet Larry Butler, Jewellery & Metalwork Designer Teena Ramsay. Published by Incertus Press (2006). Supported by The Hope Scott Trust and The University of Dundee.

Room to Rhyme
In collaboration with poet and Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney.
Published by The University of Dundee (2004).

“The images create a powerful sense of the past, elegiac but never nostalgic…”
– Susan Mansfield in The Scotsman: Review of Room to Rhyme

The Therapeutic Garden

By Donald Norfolk
Illustrated by Brigid Collins

Published by Bantam Press, London (2000)

Gardening is one of today’s most popular leisure pursuits, yet rarely, if ever, is it seen as a holistic, therapeutic practice that can both enrich our lives and fulfil our spiritual needs.

In this exquisitely crafted and illustrated book – comprising a full-colour wraparound dust jacket and containing delicate collages around monochromatic watercolour studies, designed and illustrated by Brigid Collins – acclaimed osteopath and author Donald Norfolk attempts to redress the balance as he explores the history of horticulture, and the ancient wisdom of poets and philosophers. Tracing the natural rhythms and beauty of the changing seasons, he also demonstrates how we can all discover the secrets of nature’s healing, restorative powers.

Uniquely inspirational and illuminating – like a medieval Book of Hours, to be treasured and loved – THE THERAPEUTIC GARDEN invites us to recapture the simple pleasures of the past and to create a new, enriched vision of the future. It is a vision that leads us to understand how, when we cultivate the soil, we can also cultivate the soul.

Utopian Tales/Utopische Märchen
Fairy Tales and Fables from Weimar Days, by Jack Zipes. This limited edition features socialist and communist fairy-tales mainly written in the 1920s (with a notable contribution by artist Kurt Schwitters) selected and translated by Jack Zipes. It is an extended edition of Zipes’ Fairy Tales and Fables from Weimar Days, first published in 1989, with additional tales, the original German texts, and 60 newly commissioned illustrations – one for the original German version of each tale, and one for the English translation.

This edition, designed and produced by Barrie Tullett, includes illustrations by myself and artists from around the UK, including Russell Mills and David Schofield. Published by Caseroom Press. Lincon, UK (2016)

Kathleen Jamie: essays and poems on her work
Ed. Rachel Falconer. Published by Edinburgh University Press (2015).

I am honoured to have been selected to have a painting of mine (from ‘Frissure’, my collaboration with Kathleen Jamie – see above) be used as the book jacket for the very first collection of critical essays on the writing of Kathleen Jamie.

Publisher’s Description:

Kathleen Jamie’s works are classics. No one can read Kathleen Jamie and remain indifferent or unchanged. Nationally acclaimed since her first major publications in the 1980s, Jamie stands out from other contemporary poets in her exceptional musicality, her strikingly unusual perspectives, her wry humour, translucent imagery, and hard-edged economy of expression. These 16 newly commissioned critical essays and 7 previously unpublished poems by leading poets make up the first full-length study of Kathleen Jamie’s writing. The essays discuss all of her poetry collections, including The Queen of Sheba (1994), Jizzen (1999), Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead: Poems 1980-94 (2002), The Tree House (2004) and The Overhaul (2012), as well as her travel writing, including Among Muslims (2002), her nature writing, Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012) and her collaborative work, including Frissure (2013), with artist Brigid Collins.

Whether engaging with national politics, with gender, with landscape and place, or with humanity’s relation to the natural environment, this volume demonstrates that Kathleen Jamie’s verse teaches us new ways of listening, of seeing and of living in the contemporary world.

Create & Curate

Art and Writing by women in HMP YOI Cornton Vale, Scotland

Published by The University of Stirling (2014)

This little book showcases an important arts and writing project at HMP YOI Cornton Vale in Stirling, with poet Evlynn Sharp and artist Brigid Collins, in collaboration with the prison’s New College Lanarkshire Learning Centre, Artlink Central and with backing from Scottish Government agency Education Scotland.

The women who took part created their own artworks as well as curating an exhibition using works loaned from the University’s extensive art collection as a catalyst for their own creative writing and responses through visual art, in the form of ‘Poem-Houses’, a unique form of artwork for ‘housing’ poetry developed by artist, Brigid Collins.

The project culminated with a special launch for this publication at the prison on International Women’s Day 2014, for which the theme was “Inspiring Change”. Rita, one of the participants, said it was “a way to unlock all sorts of emotions and feelings, without judgement . . . an artistic breath of fresh air…”

https://www.stir.ac.uk/news/2014/04/uni-prison-project