Kirsty Badenoch

Working with National Trust's Hatfield Forest, A Common Way explores queer ecology and ecofeminism, acknowledging the diversity of the natural world and humanity’s place as part of it, connecting back to ancestral ways of understanding and respecting the land. 

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Hatfield Forest being gifted to the public as a woodland for all, the project extends this act of care and community into today’s local landscape. Together with Wayward, summer 2024 was spent in the woods with communities of women, LGBQT+ groups, and the locals who love, walk and work the Forest daily. Together, we shared childhood memories and forest food, told tales of our ancestors, jumped fences at dusk, cast spells of care on midsummer eve, made drawings in the dark, and paraded en masse in costume. The project asks questions about how we relate to the landscape and to one another, what uneccessary boundaries we are still holding on to, and what does care really look like.

The project evolved to co-create "A Common Way: A Wild Walking Tarot of the Woods", soon available to purchase.

Project run at Hatfield Forest in summer 2024; in partnership with Wayward, National Trust and Essex Cultural Diversity Project and with input from Liam Healy. Photos courtesy of ECDP and National Trust. More information here.

A performance drawing made and un-made over 48 hours at Non Gallery in Bucharest, September 2024.

I arrive in a new county with a blank roll of paper, no plan and no backup. My room is the first one. The paper almost completely fills the space. Now emptier than before I arrived, the room becomes a corridor, the same zig-zagging queue I’ve just stood in for hours at border control.

I draw continuously for one day, tracking interactions, catching and losing fragments of conversation across five languages, shuffling feet building and unbuilding.

The next day, we open. The queue goes out the corridor and down the stairs. 180 people stretch blue plastic shoe covers over their boots without question. Five don’t notice. Two take their shoes off. One stays resolutely away.

Trepidation, fragility. People cluster at the edges, conversations against the walls, toeing the line. The boundaries are clear, the permissions not. No one is told off, it seems to be ok. A little girl dances with glee over the drawing: the thin line between a gallery and a playground. Arbitrary rules demarcate, obscure and try to protect. Respect dissolves into comfort, the line breaks quickly. Two men scuffle with fury, seeing if they can rub it all away. They want to make their mark, to have an impact. Not much happens, they shrug and move on.

The mass of disposable blue clouds hold uneasy echoes of COVID-19, toppled, softly threatening beneath evening conversations. Are we protecting something, someone, ourselves? The room gets busy, the drawing disappears. Wine spills. A group of smokers traipse mud, their responsibility undone. Against my better judgement, I become the border police.

The imprints of human occupation are hard, branded: Nike Airs: Goodyear: tyre tracks disregarding deeper flows. My soft toe-prints are long gone, the parquet bones show through the waning skin. I tend to the wounds with my graphite stub, knowing that scars will remain in their beautiful, inevitable, perpetual, fragile conflict.

FALLING, FALLEN, FELLED IS AN ONGOING COLLABORATION WITH WRITER TOM JEFFREYS, EXPLORING THE MULTISPECIES LANGUAGES OF THE OLD GROWTH FOREST THROUGH SITE-RESPONSIVE APPROACHES TO WALKING, WRITING AND DRAWING.

In Spring 2023, Jeffreys and Badenoch lived and worked across two sites of remnant ancient woodland in Scotland: Abernethy Forest in the Cairngorms and Beinn Eighe on the west coast, instituted as the UK's first ever national nature reserve by a government act in 1951. Subsequently subjected to shifting management strategies, and bordered by some of the largest privately owned estates in Scotland, Beinn Eighe crystallises many of the oldest and most pressing problems affecting how power (mis)shapes relationships between people and the land.

During their residency, the pair walked the political borders between land owners, held conversations with local artists and forest managers, and immersed themselves in drawn, written and scored transpositions of the forest.

The majority of the works were produced near Beinn Eighe. Badenoch set up an improvised studio without permission in a small privately owned forestry plantation. Working on large paper skins across the forest floor, her process seeks to relinquish human control and engage symbiotically with the forest. The drawings emerge over days and nights of exposure, through the interplay of roots, mosses, rain, gravity and the occasional hungry slug. The process requires a surrendering of self, a dissolving of the human body and a deep connecting with the nonhuman spirit of place.

The resulting works are abstracted engagements with urgent political questions, including property ownership, borders, access, extraction and resistance. In rethinking what might be meant by 'working the land', each piece is also a powerfully expressive response to the site and to personal memories and relations.

Falling, Fallen, Felled was exhibited at Staffordshire St, Peckham in November 2023, and will be shown Mote 102, Edinburgh in 2024. The project is discussed with Justin Hopper on the Uncanny Landscapes podcast episode 18, and was the closing talk at ‘Researching beyond Words’ conference at École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon, December 2023.

With support from UCL Architectural Research Fund and Staffordshire St CIC. The research is informed by the research Badenoch undertook in 2022 in the Canadian boreal forest, and by Jeffreys' book The White Birch (Little, Brown, 2021). Site photographs by Kirsty Badenoch. Gallery photographs by Tsai Shengjung and Huiling He. With thanks to Robbie Synge and Doug Bartholomew, NatureScot.

The Loch Maree Islands are the most untouched remaining remnants of old growth forest in Britain. In April 2023, I trained bussed and trekked across bog and briar, and finally swam the last kilometers of freezing loch to the islands. Unable to take anything with me, I returned with simply the humble memory of having stood in the oldest, wildest place a human could stand.

These pieces stand on the edges of the loch. They do not measure, they do not demarcate, they do not lay claim. They listen. Organ pipes capturing the underwater longings of the lake and its communities, as the echoed sounds are captured, the soft traces of the tide stroke a visual echo of the mountains on the pipes’ surface. Their surreal shapes hover over and under the water.

Site-specific installation with sound. Part of an expedition undertaken with writer, Tom Jeffreys, with support from the UCL Architectureal Research Fund.

STOCKPILE GADRDEN IS A WHOLE NEW BREED OF GARDEN - AN EXPERIMENTAL LANDSCAPE LABORATORY ON ONE OF THE BIGGEST CONSTRUCTION SITES IN EUROPE. A COLLABORATION BETWEEN KIRSTY BADENOCH, PERISCOPE, UCL BIOCHEMICAL ENGINEERING AND BARKING RIVERSIDE LTD, THE GARDEN TESTS INNOVATIONS IN SOIL HEALTH ON POST-INDUSTRIAL SITES, INVITING THE PUBLIC TO EXPLROE BEHIND THE HOARDING.

In 2022, Kirsty Badenoch and Periscope initiated an interdiciplinary research collaboration to transform a working construction site on the Thames Estuary into a new type of public space. Bringing together landscape design practitioners, university researchers, construction developers and members of the local community, the garden is designed responsively to on-site processes and constructed from brownfield soil. Stockpile Garden explores local-sourced, low-cost, and low-maintenance ecological restoration amidst urban development.

First opened in summer 2022, as the garden grows, it will host a programme of public events and experiments, as it continues to test bioremediation techniques and monitor biodiversity improvements over the coming years, helping to fill current knowledge gaps in the ecological functioning of brownfield sites.

More information here, full website coming soon.

Collaborators: Periscope / Bartlett School of Architecture UCL / Department of Biochemical Engineering UCL / Barking Riverside Ltd. Project supported by UCL Grand Challenges: Small Grants (Sustainable Cities). Photographers: Kirsty Badenoch, Nick Bennett, James Hepper, Ziyi Yu.

Earth to Table is an investigation into soil health on post-industrial construction sites, collaborating with the people and processes that operate there. The site-responsive banquet table and tablewear will host a series of events in Stockpile Garden in 2024.

Soil consists of complex biological processes: additions, losses, transformations and translocations. Containing more than 25% of all biodiversity on the planet and producing 95% UK’s food, soil is a highly complex and vital living entity. Yet in the construction industry, it’s ‘aliveness’ is overlooked and commodified as a tradable material. It is regularly subjected to destructive chemical sterilisation or thrown into landfill.

Working with a site contractor team, a series of huge steel plates were buried underground on Barking Riverside construction site for three months in 2023. Over this time they became imprinted with the deep memories of the site’s heavily polluted industrial past. The resulting patinations are a long-exposure of memories that we can no longer see ourselves, but that the ground still registers. Layers of impervious London clay meets imported foreign topsoil meets heavy metal pollutants meets riverine mulch. As the steels were buried, monitored and excavated, ongoing conversations with the contractor team discussed material life-cycles and migrations, considering the ecological narratives of what is viewed as ‘waste material’, and re-seeing the construction site as a place of creativity and environmental exchange.

Simultaneously, a process of clay-reclamation tested and analysed soil conditions from various locations across the construction site, engaging with the historic clay bed that sits below London. Moving between construction site, studio and workshop, a micro-processing plant weas set up to reclaim workable clay from the ground, casting it within itself to form a series of bowls that respond to the cyclical construction and degredation process.

In 2024, the banquet table and tablewear will host a series of talks, picnics and dinners around Stockpile Garden, creating a place for exchanging stories, and for sharing knowledge and ideas for a healthier subterranean future.

The project builds on the soil research by Kirsty Badenoch and Periscope, published online in EarthWorks Vol I and featured in Working Titles: Journal for Practice-based Research Vol 2, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Table with construction support from: Robin Mather, B-Made workshop. Tablewear in collaboration with Periscope. Photography: James Hepper, Daniel Rea, Yuxi Zu.

The second phase of works interrogating the River Lea. Using the force of the river (Lea) and the motions of a swimmer (me) to shape and inflate the pieces, then reinserting the flow back into itself.

The piece slowly degrades into the river, etching its own tide tracings, rain storms and buoyancies over the course of 72 hours. Photos track days one to three.

Hackney Marshes, 51.561165N, -0.038729E

~ Riparian (adj)

‘relating to or situated on the banks of a river’

~ Score (noun)

‘a single musical document that contains all the different parts for an orchestral performance’

Riparian Score is a visual symphony performed by riverine ecologies upon mild steel.

The works invite the river to play itself. They capture the energetic exchanges between river and riverbank - eddies and flows, tidal shifts, micro bacteria rotting and decaying, organic and in-organic matter getting caught and released, the budding and blooming of algae communities, the heaving and cracking of ancient tree roots as winter storms push us through into spring.

The Lea Variations were conducted over durations from 24 to 160 hours, between 30.12.2021 and 08.04.2022. They comprise twelve plates - one of which was swept away by the river during a flash storm - and two barrels.

These variations were set along the lowland stage of the River Lea as it flows through Hackney Marshes. Emerging from its containment within a concrete channel for the last 73km, this small stretch of naturalised river sings out in low harmony and discordance. It sings of herons, carp and dragonflies; dive-bombing parakeets riding the cool air stream at dusk; the Lea Mermaids (our wild swimming group conceived during lock-down), community dog-walkers chasing up to fourteen leads at once; and summer ravers splashing e-coli into plastic pint glasses at Hackney Beach. It also sings of abandoned trolleys, plastic bags, wrappers and tampons caught in branches, illegal-sewage tipping and heavy metal contaminants that ooze a threatening iridescence when disturbed. It sings of these urban and biotic interchanges for three kilometres before re-entering its concrete case for the remainder of its journey to the Thames.

I have swam in this river almost every week since moving here four years ago. I have drawn it and drawn from it. These variations look towards another form of understanding - one that gives voice and vision to the imperceptible complex riparian processes that lurk within the river, darting too small or too fast or too vast for us to catch. These are collaborative, unchoreographed tracings, imprints of the river’s past. By it’s nature a river is a transitory state, the plates keep on eroding.

Photography credits to the wonderful Nathaniel Telemaque

Driving 8.5 hours to the Northern Hebrides, via a dip in the loch of my birthplace. Our passage transitioned through the industrial peripheries of Glasgow, humanity slowly fell away to vast element-striken scapes. The land became wilder, more turbulent, exposed. Shaped by wind and rain over millenia. Time slowed and retreated as we drove on.

The final legs of our journey to the oldest geological formation in the world were by boat, bus, boat again, and finally by foot. We arrived at the island of Iona, the birthplace of Christianity in Scotland after dark, and had to wait until morning before unloading the many sheets of steel, trowels, gloves and photography equipment I had stowed.

They were communication devices with which to listen to the landscape.

We installed the first invitation to the ocean.

When we hiked back over the hills in the dawn mists to check on it fourteen hours later, it was unrecognisable. Every eddy, flow and flurry, every wind-driven raindrop, every lunar push and pull that had passed across the thin metallic membrane during those hours had become ingrained into it. Even in such a short timescale, the undercutting of the rock that had formed over 2 800 million years was evident, cutting across the centre of the sheet. The invitation had been accepted.

An experimental dining experience, tracing the journeys of the food we grow, sense and savour; and re-orientating ourselves with nature through the meeting of food and drawing. The foraging dinner took place on Earth-overshoot day, the day when humanity's resource consumption for the year exceeds Earth's capacity to replenish it.

We invited our guests to become explorers and inadvertent artists on a culinary exploration around the magical greenhouse and gardens of Omved; to consider our precious and delicate relationships with food; and to trace the beauty and transience of the natural world around us.

Food: Our three-course journey led us through the fruits, vegetables, flowers and leaves we grow at Omved, foraging seasonal produce and considering new ways of harvesting, repurposing and cherishing all parts of the plant. We threw our crockery to the wind to touch, smell, pick and pluck our ways through each course, engaging our senses and bodies.

Drawing: As every action we make leaves a trace upon this Earth, each course was recorded through an inadvertent drawing created by the food itself, and by our own organic process of meeting, eating and conversing together. The evening formed part of the Cartographies of the Imagination Drawing Laboratory: A series of experimental workshops exploring how we navigate, perceive and translate the world around us through drawing.

Collaborators: Omved Gardens, Jo March and her team of creative chefs, with support from Sayan Skandarajah and Nick Bennett. Photography by Will Hearle.

Cartographies of the Imagination was a month-long drawing festival held in the RIBA award-winning OmVed Gardens and Glasshouse in Highgate. A multidisciplinary paper exhibition formed the setting for a series of conversations, workshops, feasts and a growing community cartography, exploring the world of drawing between the real and the imagined.

The exhibition showcased four years of experimental drawing by Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah, mapping lost and invisible land- and city-scapes. This was accompanied by a visual conversation on the peripheries of map-making, with works from leading voices in architecture, landscape, painting, sound, sculpture, technology and film. Exhibiting artists included: Francesca Benedetto, Nat Chard, Penelope Haralambidou, Charnjeev Kang, Eloise Maltby Maland, Aisling O’Carroll, Saskia Olde Wolbers, ScanLab Projects, Mira Sanders, Doug Specht, Llew Watkins and Izabela Wieczorek. The works were discussed in the Forum on 10 July. A new and experimental collaborative map of the imagination grew throughout the festival, and was exhibited in the central space. Drawn from the minds and hands of everyone who joined our experiments in the Drawing Laboratory workshops, salons and studio days.

Kirsty curated the festival with Sayan Skandarajah, which ran between 02 - 31 July 2021. The project was supported by Omved Gardens, Drawing Matter and the Sasakawa Foundation. Photography by Thomas Broadhead.

SAIHO-JI

The traditional zen gardens of Kyoto were never drawn. They existed as ritualistic acts, at the core of daily Buddhist practice. Their original designs have been deduced from a series of instruction manuals, written and taught maintenance regimes rather than from a set of architectural drawings. These instructive texts are similar to musical scores – they lay out guidelines to conduct an act, but are not themselves expressive of the played piece in its entirety. The Japanese garden is revered as an act, and it’s essence lies within the prolonged experience of it’s performance - it’s continuous recomposition, the care and ritual of the gardener tending to it, and the subtle and sensational elements that continually disrupt it’s delicate balance.

The garden transcripts explore alternative ways of depicting the garden as an ongoing set of processes. They are 1:1 scale physical re-enactments of the spaces themselves - drawn of, in and with the gardens they depict.

Saiho –Ji is a garden shaped a series of accidents. The performative drawings are layered through repeated rituals, events and accidents over the course of days, weeks, months and years.

The 12th Century garden of the Saiho-Ji Temple was originally conceived as a pure white carpet of sand, irrigated by an intricate system of carved water channels. Following the decline of the monastery in the 14th Century, the garden fell into a long period of disrepair, and the subsequent flooding of the grounds in the Edo Period led to the spontaneous growth of moss. Away from human gaze, a rich carpet of moss slowly engulfed the entire site. Now home to over 120 moss species, the garden has been given Unesco status, and renamed ‘Koke-Dera’ or ‘moss temple’. Revered for its fragile other-worldliness, it is now once again under a strictly manicured maintenance regime - fallen leaves are plucked daily by gardeners with grass brushes, twigs removed with bamboo broomsticks, and constant water levels maintained in the streams through pumps.

THE GARDEN TRANSCRIPTS

How can we map a place that is more clearly defined by a state of continuous change than by it's physical form? A place that through traditional cartographic or architectural drawing methods, would require constant drawing and redrawing on an almost daily basis?  The garden state is one of continuous transformation. The term ‘garden’ is often used in music and literature to imply an open field condition within which an endless amount of configurations can be played out. It is an endless dialogue between the will of the designer, the maker and the spectator with the patterns, forces and hazards of nature:

summer > winter > a storm > a period of neglect > a birthday party > an invasion of moles >

The garden is defined by the actions that create it. A space of ritual and reflection; reassessment and reaction. Each act that takes place leaves traces of varying permanence, modifying the canvas for acts to come:

summer > to water, to wilt? winter > to expose, to contain, to ruin? a storm > to eradicate,to transplant? a period of neglect > to rewild, to repaint? a birthday party > to trample, to mow? an invasion of moles > to unearth, to replant?

The garden transcripts explore alternative ways of depicting the garden as an ongoing set of processes. They are 1:1 scale physical re-enactments of the spaces themselves - drawn of, in and with the gardens they depict.

RYOAN-JI

The garden of Ryoan-Ji is unenterable to the body, designed to be viewed from a single central position on the verandah of the tea house. To be inhabited with the gaze rather than the feet, by refusing us entry the garden draws us in, as with a painting. The space is almost empty – a compositional silence – the metaphysical occupation of it aims to free the mind from the physical body.

The project was undertaken during the ‘Arts, Letters and Numbers’ residency, Albany, New York, 2017. The large-scale ink works explore complex interplaying forces of turbulence and turmoil, compressions of speed, impact and fluidity.

They transfer the energies of meteorological phenomena into expressive and atmospheric cartographies, performing with time, speed and gravity to create large calligraphic compositions that consist of smaller delicate interplaying movements when viewed close up. 

The paintings are drawn from progressive distances away from the paper, from 1 to 2 to 3m, capturing the dynamic performance of their formation through the speed, splay and force of the line. They are cartographical dances, simultaneously performed and caught mid-performance.

PERFORMATIVE PAINTINGS, 160CM x 90CM

Enacted at height 3m, speed varies from 1 to 6 m/s, duration 10 to 90 minutes.

The Maldives archipelago is one of the most remote, beautiful and fragile places on earth. The third most endangered country from rising sea levels and the lowest in the world, these tiny islands are home to 400 000 people and in constant threat of submergence. Many of the islands have already been abandoned and entire towns are currently under governmental and charity-led programmes to relocate to neighbouring “safe” lands.

The map plates preserve six of these endangered islands as relics of how they stood upon my visit last year. From on-site mappings, the island outlines are hand-etched into copper sheets and then exposed to a series of acid erosion processes in reflection of the destructive ocean forces. The process takes several days to complete, simulating in scale the slow yet persistent degradation of land. The resulting three-dimensional topographical models thus preserve a frozen moment of these endangered places caught in transition. The embossings pressed from the plates are almost invisible - ghosts - as the islands will themselves too soon be.

1. Kandholhudhoo, Raa Atoll 5.4638° N, 73.0347° E. Abandoned 2004

2. Dhuvaafaru, Raa Atoll 5.6183° N, 72.8556° E. Abandoned 2060

3. Berinmadhoo, Haa Alif Atoll 7.0475° N, 72.9719° E. Abandoned 2007

4. Hoarafushi, Haa Alif Atoll, 6.9826° N, 72.8951° E. Abandoned 2049

5. Gemendhoo, Dhaalu Atoll, 5.2756° N, 73.0197° E. Abandoned 2004

6. Kudahuvadhoo, Dhaalu Atoll, 2.6707° N, 72.8914° E. Abandoned 2055

New Lohachara explories an architecture that augments nature: Architecture as [Super]Nature. Undertaken at Aarhus School of Architecture in 2013, the project was awarded the RIBA Sargeant Award for Excellence in Drawing and was featured in the RIBA Journal. 

The project centres around the preservation of disappearing lands and cultures in the face of rising sea levels. The urban-scale proposal re-engineers the principals of the water cycle, relieving Venice from rising sea levels through a series of giant wells that store and process excess floodwater from the lagoon, forming a protective ring around Venice. The flood mitigation system looks at a long-term reactive strategy that embraces water intake and balances extreme seasonal water fluctuations.

The New Lohacharian wells are sited around Venice as a notorious and fantastical land impeded by the rising seas.  The wells sit protectively, almost invisibly around Venice, touching the city lightly. Venice views New Lohachara as ephemeral, as a shifting skyscape of cloud and water. This immaterial border is celebrated in a mutual festival of water that marks the modified seasonal shift as a common territory. Weather modification utilises natural weather principles to create a “supernatural” weather system, a modified local landscape of cloud and rain that moves between New Lohachara and Venice through wind-control positioning and ionic charging.

The notion of [Super]Nature is explored in a manufactured re-understanding of the principals of the rainforest through recycling of local resources, working with steam, tapping into excess heat production, hydropower generation and water harvesting. Byproducts are fed back into the village system, using sand, mud and salt block construction.

SCHIZOPHRENIC PANOSPHERES // A HYDROLOGICAL DIARY WAS CONDUCTED AS PART OF A BREAK//LINE RESIDENCY AT THE BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, IN COLLABORATION WITH SAMUEL COULTON.

​The work explores temporal meteorologies through cyanotype exposures developed over the course of eight hours and degraded over twenty-four.

Two opposing topographies // converge across 11 000km of water 51.510° N 0.118° W // 34.901° N 56.165° W

From where the River Thames // meets the North Sea

To where the Río de la Plata // meets the South Atlantic

Two weeks to sail // from London to Montevideo by ship (1914)

With nothing to do // but study the sky and survey the sea

Instigating two weeks of // schizophrenic weather recording (2018)

A simultaneous account // of meteorological immateriality

Drawn in light and water // through measure, clue and witness

From one evaporates // unto to the other

The Great British Winter // exposes the South American Summer 15.01.2018 // 28.01.2018