Pauline McCloy-Turtle is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and producer based in Helensburgh, working across participatory practice, environmental storytelling, immersive media and public engagement.
Her work explores relationships between people, place, memory and systems of change. Through workshops, installations, moving image, digital environments and collaborative making, she creates accessible experiences that invite reflection, imagination and connection.
Pauline has worked with museums, heritage organisations, schools, communities and cultural partners across Scotland, with recent projects exploring ecology, climate futures and new ways of experiencing shared space.
Pauline McCloy-Turtle | Artist Portfolio
Place, participation, ecology and immersive storytelling.
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Pauline McCloy-Turtle is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and producer whose practice explores the relationship between people, place, memory and systems of change. Working across participatory projects, installation, moving image, digital environments and public engagement, she creates experiences that invite reflection, imagination and connection.
With over twenty years’ experience across museums, heritage, communities and cultural organisations, Pauline’s work is rooted in collaboration. She is interested in how creative practice can open space for dialogue, build confidence, and help people see themselves, their histories and their environments differently. Listening, exchange and accessibility are central to her approach, with projects often developed through co-creation with participants, partners and local communities.
Recent work has increasingly focused on ecology, climate futures and the emotional relationship between people and landscape. Through immersive storytelling and sensory design, she explores how creativity can help communities respond to environmental change, reconnect with nature, and imagine more hopeful futures. Projects such as ECOL, Heliosphere and Holoscene combine sound, light, spatial experience and narrative to create moments of wonder, reflection and shared presence.
Alongside physical installations and public programmes, Pauline also works with digital tools and real-time technologies to expand access to culture and participation. She is interested in how emerging platforms can be used thoughtfully, not as novelty, but as ways to create belonging, memory and new forms of collective experience.
Based in Helensburgh, with strong connections across Argyll & Bute and the west coast of Scotland, Pauline is particularly interested in projects shaped by local knowledge, environmental responsibility and the distinct social and geographic realities of rural and coastal communities.
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Commissions
ECOL
Gallus Glasgow
Stonefield Park Gateway
Lullaby Installation
Exhibitions
DesignersBlock Milan
DesignersBlock London
The Lighthouse Glasgow
Residencies
Solaris Simulacra – Market Gallery
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Glasgow Museums
National Trust for Scotland
Scottish Civic Trust
Creative Scotland
UKRI
AHRC
CoSTAR Network
South Lanarkshire Council
House for an Art Lover
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Selected Works
ECOL
Immersive Environmental Experience
ECOL is a real-time immersive forest environment exploring ecology, interdependence, and the human relationship with the natural world through sound, scenography, and responsive atmosphere.
Developed as a multisensory digital landscape, the work invited audiences into a living environment shaped by movement, light, and layered sound. Drawing on the language of forests, ecosystems, and unseen connections, the project considered how immersive space can deepen emotional connection to nature and encourage reflection on care, fragility, and coexistence.
The experience combined spatial worldbuilding, environmental storytelling, and real-time visual systems to create a contemplative encounter between audience and environment.
My role focused on creative direction, environmental design, visual development, and collaborative delivery.
Themes included ecology, systems, listening, connection, and belonging.
See more on Ecol and how it was produced
HELIOSPHERE: RELIABLE NARRATOR
Heliosphere: Reliable Narrator is a spatial light and projection work exploring celestial movement, cycles of time, and the emotional experience of scale.
Developed as an immersive audiovisual environment, the piece used shifting light, motion, and layered sound to evoke the rhythms of planetary systems and the human desire to understand our place within them. Expansive visual forms and atmospheric composition invited audiences into a contemplative space shaped by movement, perspective, and wonder.
The work considered how time can be felt through repetition, orbit, change, and return, creating an encounter between intimate human perception and vast cosmic systems.
My role focused on artistic direction, spatial composition, immersive storytelling, and visual design leadership.
Created collaboratively by Charles Turtle, Pauline McCloy-Turtle, and David Donaldson.
Themes included time, wonder, motion, perspective, and our relationship to scale.
GALLUS GLASGOW
Digital Heritage Experience
Gallus Glasgow is a playful digital heritage experience connecting audiences to Glasgow’s built environment through animation, humour, and accessible storytelling.
Created as an interactive multimedia project, the work reimagined civic heritage for contemporary audiences through character-led narratives, bold visual design, and engaging digital formats. Drawing on Glasgow’s architecture, public spaces, and local identity, the project invited people to connect with the city’s stories in ways that felt lively, welcoming, and relevant.
The experience explored how heritage can move beyond static interpretation, using humour, movement, and immersive media to open new pathways into place, memory, and belonging.
My role focused on art direction, environment design, narrative development, and creative leadership.
Themes included civic identity, access, participation, storytelling, and pride of place.
View the microsite here
Read more about this project here
See how the project evolved into a 21st Century multimedia piece here
SOLARIS SIMULACRA
Residency Project, The Market Gallery, Glasgow
Solaris Simulacra was a collaborative residency made with performance artist Rebecca Green, it explored ideas of personhood, presence, and relational identity through installation, light, text, video and performance.
Developed in response to Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris, the project examined how the unknown can appear through forms that are almost familiar yet remain unresolved. Working within the gallery, we used found objects, projected language, costume, domestic furnishings, icons, and responsive light to create a series of immersive spatial interventions.
Alongside these installations, filmed spoken word and moving image experiments extended the work into a layered narrative environment.
My role focused on concept development, lighting and spatial design, visual composition, and collaborative artistic direction.
Themes included memory, embodiment, perception, intimacy, and the search for connection with an unfamiliar other.
CHEKTAT
Video Installation, Blackout at The Glue Factory
Chektat was a video installation exploring ecology, hidden systems, and forms of colonisation within the natural world.
Constructed from altered found footage of time-lapse mycelium growth, the work transformed fungal bodies into shifting visual metaphors for expansion, interconnection, replication, and unseen intelligence. Organic networks spread across the screen as living systems operating beneath the surface, revealing processes of occupation, exchange, and transformation often hidden from view.
Presented within the industrial setting of The Glue Factory as part of Blackout, the installation combined moving image with atmospheric lighting interventions to create an immersive and unsettling environment. The work invited viewers to consider how unseen forces shape landscapes, bodies, and relationships through gradual yet persistent acts of growth and occupation.
My role focused on concept development, direction, moving image composition, installation design, and lighting environment.
Themes included ecology, mycelial systems, invisibility, transformation, occupation, and interconnectedness.