The most recent resident artists at Glenfiddich are inspired by some unlikely but commonplace objects

In fact, the pattern - which Halter plans to register as a tartan - is one which adorns millions of plastic mesh tote bags used all over the world by refugees and others who have to travel with a lot of luggage in a hurry. The nicknames for the bags attest to this: in the US, they have been called "Chinatown totes", in the Carribbean, "Guyana Samsonite". The German name translates as "Turkish suitcase". In the UK, some have called them "Bangladeshi bags" and in South Africa "Zimbabwe bags".

As a white Zimbabwean who had to flee the Mugabe regime and now lives in Cape Town, Halter is fascinated by the paraphernalia of exile. He also loves local colloquialisms - hence the boots. "One of the interesting dialect expressions here (in the North-east of Scotland) is 'Furry boots are you fae?' so I decided to have furry boots and a furry sporran."

Halter is in Scotland as part of the Glenfiddich Artists Residency Programme, which offers eight artists from around the world the chance to spend three months in the summer living and working at the Speyside distillery. "It's a part of the world I never would have thought of coming to, but I've really enjoyed it," he says, though he casts a wry look at the rain slanting down outside. "The summer is worse here than the winters we get in Cape Town."

He first realised the tote bag pattern could be a tartan when he analysed it in a series of prints for a show in South Africa, but saw his time in Scotland as a chance to take the idea further, having a bolt of the fabric woven by local company Johnstons of Elgin.

He also created a large-scale version of the tartan by painting the ends of whisky casks and photographing them from above, a subtle reminder that these too are not native. "All the casks are used casks, bourbon casks from America, sherry casks from Spain. The pattern should be visible on Google Earth, so it is visible from outer space to another kind of alien."

Halter, 33, was born in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in the midst of the Bush War, which overthrew white rule."One of my earliest memories is handling weapons like grenades, everyone was highly armed." His parents, who were originally from Switzerland, fled the country two years ago after a violent attack and now live in Germany.

"A lot of my work deals with the experience of being out of Zimbabwe and living abroad. I feel my roots have been severed. The place I grew up in doesn't exist any more, I do feel quite homeless. The rest of my family have sworn off Africa for life. I was glad to grow up there, I had a great childhood, but it has a very problematic history."

He has made works using local African craft techniques such as weaving pulped paper, creating maps of Zimbabwe from banknotes (worthless, owing to inflation), or a copy of Orwell's Animal Farm. During the World Cup in South Africa, he made a project called "Shifting the Goalposts", exchanging a goalpost from a rural football field in South Africa with one in Zimbabwe.

He has been back to Zimbabwe twice in the past year. "At first I thought the situation had improved quite a lot because they had hard currency - they now use US dollars - and there was stuff on the shelves. But there is no political or economic freedom, there is no freedom of speech. It's almost impossible to make art there unless it's just pretty pictures or tourist stuff."

He found this out first-hand when he and two artist friends (one black, one white) were seized and detained by Zanu-PF agents. "I've never been so terrified, I thought we were just going to vanish. They were convinced that us two white guys were using (the black guy) to make a film to portray Zimbabwe in a negative light, when in actual fact it was his video we were helping him with.

"They were calling for boiling water to be thrown on us, they made us sit on the floor, take off our shoes, beat us up a bit. A couple were bent on taking us to the pit to beat us to death. We got out because I was allowed to make one phone call to the international art festival in Harare which I was part of, and there was a guy working in security there who was quite high up in the police. He took it upon himself personally to make sure we got out."

After an ordeal like this, the quiet, verdant countryside of Speyside must come as a welcome relief. The most that happens here is the arrival of another coach-load of tourists to observe the slow and steady process of making whisky.

However, in the various cottages dotted around the Glenfiddich estate, ideas are being distilled into art. Almost 70 artists have participated in the residency programme since it was launched nine years ago, including Ross Sinclair, Christine Borland, Alison Watt and Rosalind Nashashibi.

Though there is a marketing element - the programme has evolved to concentrate on countries which are key markets for whisky, and artists will exhibit both at Glenfiddich and at home - the programme imposes few restrictions and emphasises the integrity of the work.Each artist supplies one work for a growing collection, the first exhibition from which will take place in January at the Fleming Collection in London.

"There's no point in being prescriptive, it's about the maturation of ideas," says programme co-ordinator Andy Fairgrieve. "We don't want people to come and do something about whisky, we want them to come and make work about the experience of being here."

Certainly, it seems that this year's crop of artists have had no problem finding inspiration in their surroundings. New York-based photographer Matthew Sandager hasn't stopped taking pictures since he arrived in June - he has taken "many thousands" and has had to buy extra hard-drive space for his computer to accommodate them.

Sandager, who works as a commercial photographer in New York but also has a Fine Art practice describes his first impression of the distillery as "Harry Potter meets Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." He set out to "make a portrait" of every aspect of whisky-making, from growing barley to bottling and labelling, but his eye for detail makes the work more than simply documentary.

He has also been photographing the landscape. "I've been here from the summer solstice to the autumn equinox, I've been paying attention to the changes in the environment. I'm encyclopaedic and energetic."

He has enjoyed exchanging his apartment in the East Village for a quiet house overlooking a field of ripening barley. The field is the subject of one of a series of time-lapse sequences, which portray the same location over 24 hours edited down to a few minutes. It is, he says, a kind of distillation.

Vancouver-based Damian Moppett was immediately struck by the landscape and its history. Having made work in Canada about the Sasquatch - the "Bigfoot" monster said to inhabit the North American forests - he began set out to find a Scottish equivalent.

His hunt took him to Popular Tales of the West Highlands, published in the 1880s, in which he discovered the "Brollachan", a "formless creature that speaks only two words, 'Myself' and 'Thyself'". A sculpture of the sinister, antlered beast is taking shape on one wall of his cottage.

But his interest in mythological monsters also links to his fascination with the business of making works of art. "The search for the Sasquatch is a search for something that probably doesn't exist, it's all about belief. That relates to art, which is also about belief, it is ephemeral. This is a metaphor for understanding art."

Valay Shende, from Mumbai, has used his time at Glenfiddich to create a kind of retrospective using whisky bottles.He has constructed a suite of boxes, covered in deer skin and lined with a collage of photographs from the distillery past and present, each of which will display a reproduction whisky bottle made from a different material which has previously appeared in his sculptures, from copper and gold to fake leopardskin and wristwatches (still ticking).

Time is also an interest for Carrie Iverson, a glass artist from Portland, Oregon, who has been photographing the patterns and textures created by use, from worn staves from whisky barrels to the weathering on gravestones and discarded roof slates, and has been using this to create works on glass at a specialist workshop in Lybster.

Shiau-Peng Chen, from Taiwan, began with a series of maps, and worked on the shapes, simplifying - perhaps distilling - them into clean abstract geometric paintings. Mao Yan, who has a reputation as a figurative painter back in China, has made a series of dynamic portraits of distillery staff, including Fairgrieve himself.

Hayoung Kim, from Korea but studying at the Royal Academy in London, has produced a large, colourful triptych which "humanises the process of making whisky" by depicting groups of 12, 15 and 18-year old girls to reflect the three periods Glenfiddich whisky matures for. She says that, in Glenfiddich, the bright colours and pop culture references in her work feel like a marked contrast to the world around her.

"I had never been to Scotland before, this was a new, adventurous step for me. The calm, quiet countryside made me think more about me, how I found myself really different from this environment, like an Asian dish on a big Scottish dining table."

• Work by the Artists at Glenfiddich 2010 will be on display in the Distillery Gallery, The Glenfiddich Distillery, Dufftown, until 9 October.