We're here today with Soraya Smithson, the artist who did the designs for the Canongate Wall at the Scottish Parliament.

Soraya, thanks very much for coming to talk to us today.

Could you start a bit by telling us about your practice as an artist in general before we go on to talk about the wall more specifically?

I'm sort of ideas based and then from the ideas I decide on the medium so I do ceramics,

I do printmaking, a little bit of painting, sort of soft sculptures.

I sort of, it's hard to sort of really pin down and describe myself.

I think a lot of my work stems from being dyslexic and starting off with that

sort of disjunct that you don't understand. And my way of kind of finding an understanding and a root of expressing myself is through my making.

So the Canning Gatewall is obviously a kind of your design, your collage, your artwork

realised in stone as part of the Scottish Parliament building.

So it's a really kind of important public artwork that anyone can walk past and see.

But for you, it's also been quite a personal project because, of course, you knew Enrique Mariahs really well.

Can you tell us about how you first came to know, Enrique?

My parents are architects.

So kind of I do have imbued in me a sort of architectural background. You know, I just grew up with it all around me at the conversations and my parents'

drawing office was in the house. So it was just there. My father taught on an architectural summer school

in Italy that drew international students. And over the sort of 25 years that he taught on it,

it moved from different cities,

and always, you know, the students would be kind of looking at the sort of,

it was sort of, in a way, urbanism was, in a way, the overall package of what was taught in the summer school.

And Enrique and his first wife, Carme, were my father's

students at this summer school. And they just got on extremely well. And Enrique was very, yeah, in tune with my parents' work and their writings.

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