Ingrid Budge (b.1967, Orkney) is an Orcadian artist working with alternative photographic processes to create atmospheric and deeply evocative studies of landscape, memory and place. Rooted in the elemental environment of Orkney, her practice explores the shifting relationship between land, sea and sky through experimental, camera-less techniques that embrace unpredictability, chemistry and chance.
Born and educated in Orkney, Budge first developed an interest in photography during her studies in the 1980s, where early experiments with gum and salt printing sparked a lifelong fascination with historical and analogue photographic methods. Although she spent time studying in Edinburgh, the pull of Orkney’s dramatic coastline and ever-changing weather brought her back to the islands, where she continues to live and work today.
Budge works across a wide range of alternative processes including lumen printing, cyanotype, wet-plate collodion, chemigrams, pinhole photography and photoetching. Using expired photographic paper, hand-mixed chemicals and direct exposure to the elements, she creates works that feel both ancient and contemporary, images that hover between photography, painting and abstraction. Her process-led approach allows the landscape itself to become an active collaborator, with light, moisture and chemical reaction leaving traces that mirror the unpredictability of Orkney’s environment.
The coastlines, cliffs and skies of Orkney are central to her work, not as documentary subjects but as emotional and sensory experiences. Mist, salt air, erosion and shifting weather patterns dissolve familiar landmarks into poetic, alchemical surfaces that evoke memory, atmosphere and geological time. Her photographs possess a haunting, timeless quality, reflecting both the fragility and endurance of island life.
Alongside her solo practice, Budge has collaborated with poets, printmakers and sound artists on immersive projects exploring Scotland’s coastal landscapes, further extending her interest in place, perception and the experimental possibilities of analogue image-making.
Ingrid was born and educated in Orkney, she spent a year studying in Edinburgh but returned to Orkney where she still lives and works.
