Cycle Arts Festival 2025 Programme Contributors

2025 Festival artwork by Charles Turner.

Visit our event page for full lineup and programme schedule!

The Cycle Arts Festival is an outdoor mixed arts Festival presented on Renfrewshire Cycle Routes. Developed in partnership with local and national organisations the aim is to push boundaries of creativity in linking artists of mixed practice with Renfrewshire’s unique biodiversity, environments and the enjoyment of cycling.

Commissioned artists working in various media deliver site-specific creative interventions tied to places along the cycle path routes working in collaboration with the local communities.

Using interesting buildings, views and unusual locations the Festival aims to deliver a narrative of place for Renfrewshire linking to ideas of environmental sustainability, wellbeing, embedded local cultures, history of place, cycling and social change.

Programme Contributors

The Absurdist Pipe Band

The Absurdist Pipe Band is an engaging, interactive, and colorful band who will open our cycle day festivities outside of Weavers Bar on Saturday September 13th at 11am and close with a celebratory performance at the finish line in Lochwinnoch at Castle Semple Visitor Center around 2pm.

Ceithir

A boisterous ceilidh in Paisley County Square from 3-5pm on Friday, September 12th.

Coeur Sauvage

Saturday, September 13th at 11 am, Sam Worrall from Coeur Sauvage will lead a walking group from Castle Semple Visitor Centre throughout the grounds to identify and gather edible plantlife. Spend time learning about local ecologies and sourcing your own ingredients while exploring the nature trails. Please bring gloves and a bag for your bounty! Register here.

Dr. Bike + Bike for Good

Free cycle tuneups during our Friday September 12th Kick Off (first come first served)! Plus, festive spectacle Stanley Smith mounts an eye catching bike alongside cyclists on Saturday September 13th and is on-hand for minor roadside assistance. He will terminate at the finish line between 1 and 2 to join in the finish line celebration.

Eco Drama

Join Eco Drama for ‘Harvest Stories’ – an interactive session of magical stories and exciting drama games, exploring the benefits of locally grown food and how sharing can improve health and wellbeing for everyone. As part of the event, you are invited to taste a heritage apple! Suitable for all ages. Register for a 2:00 or 3:30 viewing on Sunday September 14th, and walk-ins welcome!

Fèis Phàislig

Hayley Keenan

Hayley Keenan is a fiddle player and educator who has performed extensively across Scotland and internationally. A founding member of the award-winning folk band Talisk, she has toured widely and appeared at major festivals and venues across Europe, North America, and Asia. Now balancing her role as a high school music teacher with an active performing and teaching career, Hayley continues to share her love of traditional music with players of all ages. Most recently, she tutored the fiddle classes at Fèis Phàislig’s Fèis Week 2025 in Johnstone, which welcomed over 200 participants.

Fèis Phàislig Ceilidh Trail

The Fèis Phàislig Ceilidh Trail offers talented young musicians aged 16–25 the chance to experience life on the road as professional performers. The 2025 group – Jamie Brewer (guitar), Stella McIntyre (clarsach), Anna Morrison (fiddle), and Daniel Small (accordion) – recently completed a two-week tour of the west of Scotland and Renfrewshire, including performances with Erskine Arts, National Trust for Scotland, Fresh Ayr Folk Festival, and their own concerts in Paisley, Arran, and Glasgow. Together, they bring a fresh and energetic take on Scottish traditional music, blending lively dance sets with creative arrangements that showcase the next generation of Scottish talent.

Johnstone Textile Space

Odet Beauvoisin (@odetyarn) has been spinning, teaching, and designing yarns since the 1970s. She taught Handspinning & Yarn Design at Glasgow School of Art for nine years and studied on location with Marion Cambell, the last local Harris Tweed handloom weaver to dye and handspin her own weft. As a ‘spinner in residence’ at The Coach House for 23 years, Odet demonstrated spinning and ran workshops for beginners, skill-developers, and advanced techniques. Over the past two decades, she has led workshops for the Highland Spinners, Weavers and Dyers Guild, Handspinner-Having-Fun Craft shop on Skye, and Gavin’s Mill (Milngavie).

India Boxall’s (@paperseeps) focus on textiles, including knitting with natural fibres, employing embroidery techniques, and working with salvaged scrap fabrics and yarns, lingers on matter-ing and material dialogues. She investigates themes of resistance, refraction, and the imagined material histories embedded in organic matter. Her work often takes the form of assemblages, integrating textiles with drawing, sculpture, text, and digital media. By working with unconventional materials and processes, she invites audiences to consider the entanglement of the personal, the ecological, and the cultural. She is currently undertaking the Threads Residency until early 2026 at Johnstone Textile Space, with funding from Creative Scotland’s Open Fund.

Ellie Mills

Ellie Mills – aka Ellietype – is a Glasgow-based visual artist & designer, with an interdisciplinary
practice, focused on exploring identity through traditionally gendered crafts. From hand-painted
signs to upcycled textile pieces to large-scale public artworks, her work is a celebration of
vibrant queerness and loud, unapologetic femininity. She often works collaboratively with other
makers on heritage- & community-focused projects, and enjoys using craft and storytelling to
create playful, immersive worlds for people to explore.

Refractive Collective

Join Refractive for a screening of the award-winning documentary Make it to Munich by Director Martyn Robertson. The film screening will take place at the Weavers Paisley on Thursday 11th September, 7pm (doors from 6.30pm).

In the aftermath of his recovery from a near fatal accident Ethan Walker takes on an incredible journey to carry the Scottish National Football Team’s pennant from Glasgow to Munich by bike ahead of the opening match at Euro 2024.

Plus Short Film: Highway Star | Graham Maciver | 2023 | UK | English (with Descriptive Subtitles)

A self-funded film by Renfrewshire director Graham Maciver which tells the inspiring story of Kenneth Smith and how he has continued to embrace his love of biking whilst living with Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Content Warning: Infrequent strong language, injury detail, discussion of Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Get tickets here!

Becky Duncan (Open Aye)

Becky Duncan of Open Aye leads a photography nature walk, encouraging participants to look closely at their surroundings through a treasure hunt of flora and fauna to capture through their own lenses. Please bring your own camera of any type — phone, disposable, polaroid, film, digital, DSLR, no matter your equipment or experience level. The walking tour will lead guests through scenic viewpoints and other artist installations that are a part of Cycle Arts Renfrewshire Festival 2025. The walk will be on path surfaces however participants should note that they should be able to walk for up to an hour, unaided, including some moderate inclines. Register for the Sunday 1:30pm walk here!

Fraser Boland

Fraser Boland is a Glasgow-based photographer who explores alternative and experimental ways of making images. Using handmade pinhole cameras built from discarded materials, he creates long-exposure solargraphs that embrace time, chance, and decay. Outside of his work in the film and TV industry, where image-making is tightly controlled, Boland’s photography leans into the blurry, imperfect, and instinctive, prioritising genuine images over conventional clean cut photography.

Meredith MacLeod, Poetry Curator

Meredith MacLeod Davidson is a Glasgow-based poet and writer, originally from Virginia. Meredith’s poetry is published in The London Magazine, Gutter, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Propel Magazine, and elsewhere, with reviews and criticism in The Adroit Journal, North American Review, and Oyster River Pages. Meredith is the co-founder of crisp packet poetry, and co-curates Glasgow’s DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE reading series. Their debut pamphlet, Transpiration, is forthcoming in October 2025 with ignitionpress.

With Readers

Cameron Wilson is a Glaswegian poet, artist, editor, and librarian writing in English, Gaelic, and Scots.

Cat MacLeod is a poet, library worker, eco-literature researcher, creative/environmental facilitator and bug enthusiast currently based in Dundee. She holds an MA in Literature and Creative Writing, PGCert in Applied Arts and Social Practice, was a Clydebuilt 16 poet and is currently writing a thesis on modernist roaches. Cat’s writing can be found in Burned (Generator Projects), Rebirth Anthology (The Selkie), Snack Mag, and is forthcoming from DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE.

David Ross Linklater is a poet from Balintore, Easter Ross. He is the author of four pamphlets, most recently Star Muck Bourach (Wish Fulfillment Press, 2022). His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Dark Horse, Butcher’s Dog, and bath magg. He lives in Glasgow. @davidrosslinklater / www.davidlinklaterpoetry.com

Shona Floate is a Glasgow-based writer from Broughty Ferry, Dundee. Her writing is informed by her experiences of queer womanhood and family. Shona has performed for the Canal Dream Art festival 2024 and Opal Night’s Solstice Mini Fest 2025. You can find her work in print in From Glasgow to Saturn, Fierce Salvage: A Queer Words Anthology and DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE. She is also the cofounder and editor of Cut Wife Mag.

Reed Hexamer

Reed Hexamer is an artist and researcher wandering and perforating the membranes dividing ecological, archival, and somatic frameworks. Their practice positions sculpture, writing and sound to tear at teleological systems of knowledge production through fugitive field work, extended metaphor and speculative errant inquiry.

Sophia Archontis

Sophia Archontis is a multimedia artist originally from Cyprus, now based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her work spans poetry, noise/sound art, photography, and music, and she has been featured in publications Tangerine Dream, From Glasgow to Saturn, as well as exhibitions Urban Coincidence and off-page. She is also the host of the monthly residency Electronic Experimentations at the Flying Duck.

SCOPE Artist Network

Scope Artist Network (@scope.renfrewshire) presents an outdoor exhibition feature works by Anna-Lena Nikolovski, Celie Byrne, Davardo, Indie McCue, James Watt, Lee Davidson Connor, Leo Wight, Sherjeel Hussain, and Stacey Walton as well as screenings of short films by Aaron McCarthy, Celie Byrne, Christopher Devine, Fraser Boland, Gabriella Day, Indie McCue, Josh Wirz, and Lucia Vera Rosa.