ABOUT
Kirsty is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher and educator. She works to connect fragile and disturbed landscapes, communities and ecologies, with a particular focus on forest ecosystems. Through a research-led approach, she develops collaborative place-based projects that explore human and more-than-human entanglements. Kirsty’s practice spans drawing, performance and events, spatial design, installation and publications.
With ten years prior experience in landscape architecture and urbanism at some of europe’s leading practices, Kirsty’s research-led approach operates across diverse interdisciplinary knowledge practices and scales, engaging with research institutions, ecology specialists and local communities to explore landscapes as entanglements between multiple actors, voices, perspectives and agencies.
Kirsty’s practice is driven by a desire to engage the community imagination as a vital aspect of ecological regeneration. Her work spans from leading the co-design of National Trust’s 30 year vision for the green spaces of Northern Ireland, and setting up the research platform as Associate Director of Periscope; to creating Cartographies of the Imagination, a month-long Festival of Drawing in North London. From creating ecological publications and artist books, to building experimental community gardens. Since 2022, Kirsty has been curator of Microscope, a tiny experimental art-and-ecology space in Dalston.
Recent exhibitions include Non Gallery in Bucharest (2024), Staffordshire Street Gallery (2023); Safnahus Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland (2023), Omved Gardens (2021); Buddenbrooks Gallery Copenhagen (2018), and Arts, Letters and Numbers in New York (2017). Kirsty’s work has been published by Palgrave MacMillan, Field Journal, AD Wiley, École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon, Be-Pi, and Working Titles Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, alongside Mouldy Books, her publication company with Tom Jeffreys. Her work has been supported by National Trust, LAHP, UCL Grand Challenges, UCL Architectural Research Fund, Danish Art Foundation, Chelsea Physic Garden, Drawing Room and Drawing Matter.
Kirsty teaches BSc Architecture and Interdisciplinary Studies and and MA Landscape Architecture at The Bartlett, UCL, and BA(Hons) Architecture University of Cambridge. This autumn she will begin a PhD research into “How Forests Draw”, exploring drawing as a participatory method to engage social systems with forest ecosystems, at The Bartlett School of Architecture with People and Nature Lab UCL. Kirsty is a member of Spreading Routes, Department of Artecology and Landscape Research Groups, and Nature Calling Residency 2024. She volunteers with ReNature at Hackney Marshes, and speaks regularly at Universities across UK.
Contact: kirstybadenoch@gmail.com / instagram @kirstybadenoch