The Neverending Glen, the immersive multi-arts trail at Kelburn Garden Party on Scotland’s west coast, is returning for 2026 with its most ambitious programme to date, featuring over 30 artists and a new guiding theme: Beneath the Surface.
Drawn from the science of mycorrhizal fungi and the so-called Wood Wide Web of underground networks linking trees through the soil, the theme becomes a metaphor for the web of artists, musicians, makers and audiences that sustains Kelburn year after year. The glen itself, a stretch of just over half a mile where the Kel Burn rises 800 feet above the castle before dropping to the sea by way of waterfalls and deep gorges, provides the backdrop for an experience that blends contemporary art installations, pop-up performances and spontaneous encounters in a way that organisers describe as totally unique on the international festival scene.
Selected across open call, commissioned work and residency strands, the 2026 artist programme spans sculpture, installation, sound, performance, aerial circus, land art, printmaking, ceramics and walkabout theatre. Kirsten Tingle and RJ Weaver bring Mycelial Bodies, an installation of living mycelium figurative sculptures grown with blue-grey oyster mushrooms on waste cardboard and spent coffee grounds. Melissa Rankin presents a GPS-triggered soundwalk through the glen, with field recordings and original compositions unlocked location by location, culminating in a deep listening meditation at Kelburn’s iconic waterfall.
Microsteria presents CREATURE GATHERING in collaboration with Earthly Measures and The Neverending Glen at the Beach Plateau. Having first emerged through A Symbiotic Circus at Hidden Door Festival 2022, Microsteria combines electronically mutated music, visuals, costume and performance art, and following its Kelburn debut in 2024, this edition brings together performance artists, dancers, acrobats and costumed participants to honour Kelburn’s ecosystem. More Fun With Games, meanwhile, invite visitors into Kelburn Raving Stravaiging, a psycho-geographic storytelling game that traverses both the festival and the glen, digitally and physically, uncovering history, mystery and hidden treats along the way.
Other highlights include Neil Butler, Maria McCavana and Jack Butler’s Net Work, built from ghost fishing nets rescued from the sea, to which visitors attach the names of relationships they wish to mend, causing the structure to slowly rise into a pyramidal form suspended in the air. Ruby Loveday adds the second in her series of galvanised steel standing stones at a viewpoint looking out across the islands, becoming a permanent fixture in Kelburn’s outdoor collection. HAGS (Jas Robertson, Josephine O’Connor, Freya Martin) host a series of workshops in the Earth Built space using local clay sourced from nearby burns and rivers alongside coppiced hazel and willow. Lucid Acid present Second Sight, a site-specific acrobatic intervention at the woodland’s edges, inspired by the folklore belief that mythical creatures are visible only to children and the distracted. Bright Side Studios, known for transforming spaces through projection mapping and animation, will create a specially commissioned visual work bringing hidden forest worlds to life around the Beneath the Surface theme.
This year also features a new land art residency led by Scottish artist James Craig Page, emphasising nature and sustainability. Amid stone balancing, natural mandalas from found material and forest sculptures, audiences will be invited to create their own temporal land art. The wider programme also includes silk prints suspended over the river, ear casts on mossy trees, a rusted steel obelisk slowly colonised by moss, and ceramic sculptural threads winding through the woodland.
2026 marks a significant milestone for the organisation: The Neverending Glen has formally established itself as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO). This status will enable year-round residencies, classes, workshops and an expanded commissioning programme, ensuring that what has always been a public good in spirit now has the infrastructure to serve the wider community across all four seasons.
The Neverending Glen does not end when the festival does. Kelburn Estate is free to visit year-round, and its permanent art collection grows with each season. This year the team has developed a new permanent map of the entire collection, giving the estimated 55,000 people who visit the estate outside of festival time each year the means to discover the full scope of what has been created over years of creative ambition. The event is supported by EventScotland’s National Events Programme.
Image credits: Luke Gerram
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