KRESANNA Aigner spent her formative years in Findhorn Bay before, as she puts it, she “hightailed it out of there at 18, like every 18-year-old should do,” and ended up in college in Edinburgh.

Over the next quarter-century she made her name on an impressively diverse range of artistic projects and events. She worked in Belfast and Scotland, on everything from Celtic Connections to the Belfast Festival; she managed and booked shows for music acts - Eddi Reader and Bert Jansch among them; she even presented a weekly music programme on a Northern Ireland radio station.

And “for years and years,” she says, she wondered why there was no such thing as a festival in Findhorn Bay. “It’s such a great location for a festival. My event-manager head and my producer-head were knocking at my door.”

Returning home in 2011, she pondered the matter some more. If no-one else was going to stage a festival, her thinking went - well, she would do it herself.

And she did. The inaugural Findhorn Bay Festival took place in 2014, and the follow-up two years later. And, two days from now, the third one begins. Six days of celebrating art and culture. Music, theatre, visual art, dance, comedy. Opera and poetry. Tours and talks, and family events. Blue Rose Code, Liz Lochhead, an immersive light sculpture by Heather Lander (music by Michael Begg); an RSPB Scotland guided walk round Findhorn Bay’s nature reserve. In the grounds of Brodie Castle there will be the world premiere of a promenade adaption of The Buke of the Howlat, a locally-written epic Older Scots poem that dates from the 15th century.

Documentary photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert will present an exhibition of photography on the subject of North Sea fishing. And in Forres, and Elgin, there will be a giant shoebox filled with shoes and audio stories that explore our shared humanity. Entitled A Mile in My Shoes, it’s an immersive experience that has attracted more than 10,000 visitors since its launch in 2015.

There will also be a pop-up cafe and a multicultural food and music event.

“The original festival,” says Aigner, “began with lots of conversations. One of the reasons I came back home was family. My mum’s still here, and my step-dad. I was wanting to bring my children, who were at the end of their primary-school education, to a fantastic rural location.

“But also, for me, the area has always been very rich in its creativity and its culture. This really is a great place, location-wise, and there’s an abundance of creativity, talent and skill.That is my work, my life, my heartline: and it was very important to be somewhere where there was something like that.

“Together with like-minded people we formed the company in 2012, with the sole aim of producing a festival. With weeks of forming it, however, Moray learned it was facing arts-funding cuts of 100 per cent from the local council." The complete removal of funding for the local arts caused a stir. “It wasn’t like there was a massive budget,” she continues, “but at least there was an arts officer, and there was some support for creativity as well as for events. So that was interesting timing, but the result was that it propelled us as an organisation to take a leadership role with other companies that were also taking that role, and we asked ourselves, how do we navigate through these changes?

“There was a real determination for us not just simply to say, ‘Oh well, that’s the end of it’. There was a real, passionate commitment to saying, ‘This is the reality we face’, and we know we had everything necessary to overcome these challenges.”

So it proved. The first arts events were staged in 2012 and in 2013 there was a one-off event, Culture Day. That, and a couple of other projects, “were the road that led us to the inaugural festival in 2014. It was a journey that we went on, and it meant we were able to take the local community with us.

“The festival is really about embracing the creative energies and putting a major spotlight on the area as a place that wants the festival, nurtures it, is passionate about it, and is capable of hosting it.

“It is about bringing in those headline artists and telling them, ‘Come to us - ‘we can do a really good show’. And we look at how we make connections with our visiting artists, our local audiences and our local creative sector.”

The first Findhorn Bay Arts Festival opened for business on September 24, 2014. It ran for five days, offered 60 free or ticketed events, drew a total audience of 7,000 locals and visitors. The second festival, in 2016, had 14,000 attendances over six days, and featured Julie Fowlis, James Yorkston, and a Glitter & Sparkle Ball.

Aigner talks enthusiastically about the festival’s impact on Moray. That was brought home in 2015 when Creative Scotland made a £100,000 Creative Place award to Moray. At the time Aigner hailed it as something that celebrated and acknowledged “the creative energy and assets of the Forres area and sets us at the top of our game on a national level.” Three years later, she is no less passionate when discussing the award, and its measurable impact on the community.

As for the festival itself, there is a widespread acknowledgement that, in her words, “it brings business into the town, it brings really nice people into the town, and they’re here for a few days, and they are here with their families. Lots of them come back.”

She laughs. “There are several stories of this. In fact, there’s somebody working on our team at the moment ... she grew up in the area, left to live in Berlin, came back to visit her family for the 2016 festival - we actually have a photograph of her and her sister participating in one of the events. She loved it so much, and she realised that Forres was actually quite a happening place, and she has now moved back. Now, obviously, we’re not the only reason for her moving back, but I think it helps.”

The festival team has also recently employed a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, a young Forres-born woman who did a project with Aigner when she was 16 before leaving to travel, and earn a degree. “For her to come back and have her first paid job since graduating, with us, is a really big thing.”

What’s the nicest public feedback Aigner has received? “I think it’s those moment when people stop me and say to me such things as, ‘I really like what you’re doing for the area - it’s outstanding, you have transformed perception and integration of creativity and culture, and you’ve put it front and centre. It makes us happy.’

“I get that sort of thing in different words,”she continues. “I get it a lot. I’m very bashful, but I also learn to gratefully receive it, because [the festival] does take a lot of hard work, and that is why we’re doing it. We want to create incredible, memorable experiences and make people feel good too.”

* findhornbayfestival.com/