Kirsty Badenoch

A collaborative experimental performance exploring the gaps between art, architecture, landscape, dance and performance. In collaboration with an architectural choreographer, a mime-artist and a dancer, we uper stompy, sweaty, dancey and entangled, we translating and improviing each others practices between us and bringing the whole audience in to move as one.

Each of us questions and interrogates agendas be it social, cultural, environmental, architectural or political in/with performative and educational spheres. For all of us, who we are and what we do are multiple and layered where our identities and territories shift fluidly embracing beyond commonly understood disciplinary boundaries. This multiple fluidity, we consider, is a necessity when we face global crises where holistic human approaches are fundamental.

In collaboration with Takako Hasegawa (Dancing Architects), Jonathan Ben-Shaul and Margherita Dello Sbarba. Performed at The Architectural Association 'Invisible Actants' AHRA symposium, May 2024.

Growing Pains: An incredibly poignant day of mark-making, with over fifty drawing contributors.

A one-day drawing workshop inviting throngs of East London kids and their parents to dream up their self-titled “Everyone Extravaganza Park” - a magical green vision for their future city. It was chaos. The park then became the stage set for a documentary theatre piece: “Fortuna.” A verbatim performance of a twelve year research project following a cohort of young people in East London as they journey from year six to sixth form, created by Maxi Himpe in collaboration with Professor Louise Archer and young people in East London.

Powerful and powerless, the drawing still contains traces of rainbows from the eager hands of early morning six year olds, peering out from inky evening footprint clouds of teenage self-doubt, social hierarchy, imposed value-systems and fears of future unemployability.

School chairs rip through the paper as teenagers slouchily rock back at the question “so what do you want to be when you leave school?”

— Long pause —

“I want to be me.”

Performed as part of Trellis: Field Works for UCL East, with thanks to Maxi Himp and Louise Archer, and photographed by Andre Roach.

A big intuitive drawing workshop for art teachers across London. We immersed ourselves in sound, space and the shifting weight of our own bodies to create some beautiful intuitively drawn scores. An amazing space to work in, with some wonderfully open experimental creatives.

Thanks to the wonderful art team at Queens College, London

For the opening exhibition of the new Drawing Room building in October 2023, Kirsty Badenoch was commissioned to run a workshop for artists inspired by Emily Speed’s commission for UNBUILD: a site of possibility. The workshoo explores the body as building, and how places are formed through the interactions that play out between their walls.

The one-day workshop used drawing and movement to explore Drawing Room’s new building as a blank canvas, expanding the space between the building’s history as a former industrial estate, and its future as the centre for creativity in drawing. Together we wove a drawing procession through our individual and collective bodies, through the skin of the interior and the exterior, and through experimental and intuitive play. A simple lunch formed a central part of the workshop, acknowledging the importance of connection, community and everyday ritual as part of the creative process. Artists included in UNBUILD participated are were joined by Tannery Arts studio holders and Drawing Network members.

Liverpool School of Architecture / Granby Winter Garden 2021

Workshop collaborator: Daniel Rea

Traditional architectural drawing techniques are well suited to depicting static pre-determined forms, but do not generally allow for indeterminacy, deviation or multiple-authorship. They remain ‘in control.’ As designers, we are anything but in control.

Similarly, the architecture studio is traditionally kept very separate from the site. Design, designers and communities meet for short periods of time, and then return to the safety of their own worlds to work. Drawing is kept as a private act.

With a group of wonderfully adventurous students at The University of Liverpool, we looked to throw these notions to the wind.

Granby Winter Garden is designed by and with its community. It is a unique public space housed within a former private residence, made possible through an amazing spirit of collaboration. Here, the home becomes public space and the street becomes home.

For three days in January, Granby Winter Garden became both our site and our studio. We sought to embody the collaborative essence of Granby through experimental and imaginative drawing, capturing its sights, smells and spirit.

We explored how design can be a shared activity - working together to develop communal and democratic drawings, blurring the boundaries between ourselves and each other.

We sought to close the gap between the site and the design studio, working in and with the garden, inviting drawing to become a public act. We sought to experiment, to embrace chance and welcome the unexpected. To become vulnerable, and to free ourselves from any notions of control.

Our project constructed two new temporary public spaces. The first transposed Granby Winter Garden into the University of Liverpool, inviting all visitors to participate in its making through drawing their own interpretations into it. The second was sited in Granby Winter Garden, transposing our interpretations and dreams back into the space itself.

A collaborative voyage into the Antarctic, we traced in the footsteps of the first expedition to the south pole, in 1901 by Edward Wilson and his team. The drawing workshop practiced embodying the sensorial natures of an extreme landscape, through collaborative drawing. Working with a group of 16 practicing landscape architects and academics in Oslo, we explored working as an ecosystem as well as conveying one. In partnership with NLA, workshop conducted in 2021.

As part of the Cartographies of the Imagination festival of drawing, a series of workshops invited school children and youth groups, art and architecture students, artists, makers, growers and other creatives to participate in a giant collaborative map of the imagination. The map was drawn, redrawn and re-re-drawn over the course of the festival, by the eyes, hands and imaginations of many.

With a multi-disciplinary approach to speculative drawing and map-making practices at all different scales, the Drawing Laboratory uncovered, interpreted and reimagined the hidden secrets and stories around us; exploring how we experience place, both individually and as a collective. Experimenting with different drawing processes, found and made materials and engaging all our senses, each workshop traced, translated and re-imagined a new layer each responding to the ideas and drawings of the last. Through an additive and open-ended process, together we built, grew and populated the cities, gardens and mindscapes of our collective imagination. Together, we drew Cosmocartos.

The Drawing Laboratory collaborative map was exhibited in the greenhouses as it emerged over the course of the festival. Its official inauguration was on our last day - Friday 30 July, where we invited all participants to celebrate their part in it’s making.

The Drawing Laboratory was led by Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah.

Photographs by Will Hearle

Flimwell Woods / Bartlett UCL MA Landscape 2022

Workshop Collaborator: Thomas Kendall, with support and thanks to Tom Budd, Steve Johnson, The Architecture Ensemble, Tim Waterman and the Flimwell Park team

How lost do you find the woods? We spent three days working the ancient woods of Flimwell. Twenty students, twenty balls of string and three saws. Splitting in two, we navigated dense rhodedendrums, strung together dead hollow birch trunks and squelched through boggy terrain. We took clues from deer paths, reused felled trunks to build bridges and by day three, we found ourselves in a completelt transformed woodland, with space to move and space for new growth.

Drawing Matter Summer School, Shatwell Farm

Workshop Collaborators: Andrew Clancey and the drawing team, Drawing Matter Trust

“I’ve got you a present,” said Niall. A field, a 3m wide lawn-mower pulled by a tractor, 45 AS/A-Level students and one hour. Our collaborative intervention explores the architecture of removal, temporary public space and field micro-ecologies. We trod a procession together at shouting-distance, then tried our best to stay still as the looming, booming, rotating-bladed tractor headed straight for us.

Omved Gardens, Highgate

Workshop Collaborator: Sayan Skandarajah. With support and thanks to Nick Bennett, Karen Leason and the Omved team

As part of Cartographies of the Imagination: Festival of Drawing, a two-day workshop hosted university students across the creative arts.

The workshop tested an approach to cartography and placemaking as a social practice, seeking to forefront the act of drawing as an act of co-creation. The project explored the advantages of collaborative drawing as ingraining of a collaborative attitude to design, and the embrace of chance within an open-ended drawing process. Three drawings were created over fourteen hours by fifteen pairs of hands.

Flying in the Folded Continuum: ‘We surrendered ourselves to the bees, using their interactions to form the basis of the drawing and the spatial potential of the fold and their movements to guide our pencils... Doing so reveals the overlapping trajectories between the bees, lavender, and logs available on site, that when unfolded resemble the fragmented dance done by the hive.’

Terra Collisions: ‘The landscape seemingly became a choreography which we deciphered and learnt, this was the enactment. Having understood the pattern, the speed, the rhythm of the garden’s movements, we created our own ‘landscape’

Negotiated Trails: ‘Awash with marks, gestures and trails, the square is occupied and performed, shifting from the dictated to the designed. Movements across the page share a defined set of roles and actions - prompts inducing response – while shadows fluctuate across site and time, the light revealing notational grids beneath the land.’