https://www.kirstybadenoch.com/projects daily 1.0 2025-09-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1494161821187-6Z4E4VE85G43KRJES3AJ/PP2.jpg PROJECTS   Interplanetary vegetal illustrations for my great friend at Planterplaneter, Kaja Skytte. Buy limited edition works here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1505471129882-JKY7H9RB4LEW92A84KW7/NEW+TERRIROTIES_04+RES.jpg PROJECTS FORM | FLEE | FRAGMENT New geographies are formed from the fragments of old places thrown into turmoil by complex interplaying forces. A fluid world constantly in flux, changing speed and tempo, zooming in and out from itself and examined from multiple angles. Each drawing explores a moment within the turbulence - the coming together, falling away, and unpredictable choreography of parts caught in a perpetual state of genesis and destruction. The works explore the complexity of mapping dynamic situations through engaging multiple perspectives, fragmentation, confusion and conversation between social, geographical and architectural viewpoints. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1505579306991-I0B86TBSTCYBFUOYC72C/MAL2.jpg PROJECTS   MAPPING FLUIDITY Aqua Fluxus is an ongoing project investigating cartographies of turbulance, chaos and fluidity. The project documents a series of natural disasters that impacted remote island micro-communities, leading to the displacement, abandonment, rebuilding or cultural reinstating of an entire community. I have visited and studied a series of these situations over the last three years, investigating issues of geographical instability and forced nomadism. The project investigates develops a series of maps that capture these moments of sudden and unexpected interaction between man and nature. The interest is in the interplay of events as the dominant physical language rather than the physical geography, experimenting with alternative cartographic methods centred around recording the of memory of a place in process. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1506068184679-GQMEJ26P5WJ8C12FOV6C/Narrative.jpg PROJECTS SOLASTALGHIA Derived from the Latin cium- (comfort) + Greek -algia (pain) ~ The homesickness one experiences when one is still at “home”. SOLASTALGHIA has been coined in psychology to describe the pain or sickness caused by an inability to derive solace from one’s home environment, it having altered beyond control or recognition. The ancient Inuit term uggianaqtuq, traditionally used to describe an obscure behaviour, often in reference to a "friend acting strangely," has been re-employed to describe unfamiliar weather behaviour and unexpected climatic shifts. A collection of postcards from lost places that still exist - places absent of their presence - explores relationships between psychological states and states of the environment. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1542272888149-R7SX4QS3ACYKH1HS5L6C/Kirsty_Badenoch_Aeon_02.jpg PROJECTS VISUALISING SUSTAINABLE RESEARCH AND ECOSYSTEM DESIGN Aeon Strategy are gaining global ground as a pioneering platform on energy, climate change and the built environment. A series of drawings commissioned to visually explore their projects as a research collective, project facilitator and within urban strategy and policy support. See more of the sustainable and socioeconomic energy projects they are involved with at www.aeonstrategy.com https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1549836152725-54H5R1AM6LQXYCB714OY/06+Erosive_Cartographies_Kirsty_Badenoch.jpeg PROJECTS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1555441395465-XNFJU9K2KDE3RHV9MCF9/03Plate_Kirsty+Badenoch_Erosive+Cartographies01.jpg PROJECTS 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 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1549834999582-OFD9OVVUS9FSFW4ACYYT/01.jpeg PROJECTS DE-CAY In physics, when a radioactive substance decays, it does not become damaged, nor transition to a worse state, but simply changes to a different form, during the process of which it produces radiation. The repossession of decay as a nutritious, productive process is explored through casting live matter, cultivating weirdness through time-casting mosses, lichens and mycelium in epoxy resin. In their sped-up micro-lifespans, The foraged bacterial matter naturally feeds off rotting or decomposing plant matter. Through the curing process, they are subject to sped-up processes of decomposition at the same time as they are cultivated. They are growing at the top as they are dying at their base, forming strange fractal distortions between growth and decomposition. The project is collected and decayed from samples and observations of the ancient garden of Saiho-Ji in Kyoto. Experiments for something bigger. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1585485517502-RQJ61N089AHW7VU1N3XH/KirstyBadenoch_SaihoJi_Full02.jpg PROJECTS 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1585487519324-EKAMOT78VKYHEFNO2LK7/Kirsty+Badenoch_Garden+Transcripts.jpg PROJECTS 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1673217784519-N1NE9J45AS42THS9C226/01_Oban_03+Landscape.JPG PROJECTS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1673216917410-QP6DH6XRSF54OGBZAG1C/Kirsty+Badenoch_Lea+Variations.jpg PROJECTS ~ 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1691224767056-4BKUPYSFTJV5XLJI66TR/IMG_2044.jpg PROJECTS 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1683409122282-50I5ID9G3H2XD2RQJEVI/KirstyBadenoch_COTI.png PROJECTS 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1697326000774-C2C5VU6JY0J7CS7XOVHI/Dinner+Dialogues_Kirsty+Badenoch04.jpg PROJECTS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1703972065221-WFE96KODKPLPP0GI9Y6T/StockpileGarden_KirstyBadenoch_Image01.jpg PROJECTS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1703973179711-YFUNKG1O9QOLRHBR2N5L/StockpileGarden_StoryTable_KirstyBadenoch_Image07.jpg PROJECTS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1505474015071-3WQN4259WYW7P4O9QKNI/Large03_black.jpg PROJECTS 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1704648180871-BAGU8V897W51E4LGQGP8/NL13.jpg PROJECTS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1533451045124-I0G2ZLAUAJ3ZE8CFSZS5/Kirsty+Badenoch_Schizophrenic+Panospheres.jpg PROJECTS SCHIZOPHRENIC PANOSPHERES // A HYDROLOGICAL DIARY WAS CREATED DURING THE BREAK//LINE CREATIVE RESEIDENCY AT THE BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE. 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 A temporal work exploring meteorologies through cyanotype exposures developed over the course of eight hours and degraded over twenty four. In collaboration with Samuel Coulton. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1704649403116-9XSUGSUD04OKDMG5TQSB/KirstyBadenoch_SpectresOfTheLea.jpeg PROJECTS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1728766972520-YTN1TDHKNAXBHRWAUU62/Tataputarcny_KirstyBadenoch05.JPEG PROJECTS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1728764904213-D8UBB6ATFHDNI84F8GZ9/A+Common+Way+KirstyBadenoch_NationalTrust01.jpg PROJECTS 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1730201898129-T0FN298T8R2A2TW5BTC8/Trespass_KirstyBadenoch15.JPG PROJECTS 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1691156439730-NZHM9S87LLA36I6796GR/Forest_Studio_Kirsty_Badenoch.jpg PROJECTS Falling, Fallen, Felled is a 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1734354116292-FMFPYNWJN2ULBX4FSXZ4/Counterbody_Kirsty+Badenoch+Elin+Eyborg_01.png PROJECTS Counterbody explores the notion of an environmental body through collective action. The situated performance was conducted with architect and dancer Elin Eyborg in September 2024, with participants from Norwich University of the Arts. When we speak of the body, we first regard the self. The complex bag of emotions, organs. memories, traits and desires bound together in a thin semi-translucent skin. Yet the contemporary body reaches much further. Our contemporary self implicates all across the world - spiritually, musically, materially; through direct or indirect engagement with mass processes of extraction, production, consumption; in trends for breakfast avocados, coffee beans and international zoom workshops. Our environmental body is vast, interconnected. It is psychologically present in every action that we individually and collectively make. It haunts us. Yet it is incredibly hard to comprehend; existing in myths, rumours and news stories, too often physically absent. In Counterbody, we examine and thicken the site of exchange between the human body and the environmental body, to connect the disparate realm between the ‘self’ and the ‘land’. Through collective enactment with the landscape, we empower the body as a locus of awareness, to create bonds between senses and sites. The project comprises relay performances where the participants, in formations reminiscent of forensic work or beachcombing, incrementally expand the micro- and macro-actions of the tide. Through our interconnected swarm, we translated and expanded the tide beyond its location, walking the shadow waterline and the anticipation of it sweeping back again. The longer we walked, the more we unified and yet the more we fell out of time. Our asynchronicity mirrored the nuances between the microwaves meeting and flowing over one another. Our unison and our fluctuations were part of a total, complex, rhythmic and micro-rhythmic system. By the end of our act of mass-labour, we had shifted twelve pebbles by six metres. With Counterbody, we amplify a larger body of awareness by performing as a collective ensemble. We sought to disperse the concept of a singular, bounded body in favour of a shared, fluid body—a body that moves with, rather than against, the tide. This cultivates a tangible sense of environmental embodiment, inviting participants to perceive their own physicality as intertwined with the land and its temporal shifts. With thanks to James Hepper, Christian Skovgaard Petersen and Gustavo Balbela for support, filming and photography. Performance conducted as part of the Spatial Ecologies pilot with Norwich University of Arts, September 2024. Presented at AHRA International “Body Matters” Conference in November 2024, Norwich University of Arts. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1752842768263-KEZ5L89KMELNAHEPB17I/02_California_Forest+Fire+WIP01_lr.jpg PROJECTS Sap is not liquid but memory softened by warmth was exhibited at Oriel Archipelago, Llansteffan, 23-31 Aug 2025, following a residency in April 2025 with US Geologic Survey at Sequoia National Park Giant redwoods have flourished across England and Wales since their introduction from California in 1850s. As some of the largest and longest-living organisms on earth, their towering canopies are about to surpass the native British treeline. Yet, in need of fire to melt their resin and release their seeds, these giants stand solitary and infertile, growing only where planted by human hand. This summer, as droughts deepen across Wales and England, the threat of fire feels closer than ever. The redwoods stand in wait. Attending to the giant redwood invites us to question past and future dynamics between humans and forests; to forge connections between distant ecosystems and local cultures, and to consider threats of environmental destruction as future potential acts of love, care, and hope. The drawings, photographs and field notes were made during an artist residency with United States Geologic Society in Sequoia National Park, California in mApril 2025, this exhibition invites the future forests of UK to meet and correspond with an ancient forest ecosystem on the other side of the world - one that is perhaps not so distant from our own. Working directly with the land, weather, living trees and burned charcoal stumps, the large-scale drawings seek to draw from, with, and as a forest. Tracing the lines of forest fires, re-siting British trees within their native Californian geography, and breathing in time with ancient beings; the collected works compile a fragile apparition of the wisdom, memory, and language held within the forest. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1756892239925-3N1DO26WX0UITDLP4MGW/Hedgewitch_Canvas+Zoom.jpg PROJECTS A two-year arts-and-ecology project working with young people across Cambridge, to explore of forgotten folklore and future visions for a wyld Cambridge. Project partner: Wayward, supported by Bellway, and was exhibited at The Cambridge Room in June 2025. The words “witch”, “hag” and “hedge” all come from the same old English word. Located on the border between civilisation and wilderness, the hedge was lawless and unruly, and the witch who lived there possessed knowledge, mysticism and healing powers beyond scientific rationale. In today’s era of climate and biodiversity flux, we now find ourselves looking beyond science toward the greater wisdoms of the land, its plants and animals, witches and wylds. In our search for the contemporary Hedge Witch of Cambridge, we ask, what clues can ancient folklore provide for future environmental thinking? How can stories help us to grow a healthier, greener, wylder future? And how can we work collaboratively to better care for our environment and for one another? This project grows like a hedgerow - messy. With lots of voices speaking at once at different speeds and pitches, we quickly forget which of us drew what and when. We shift our plans as conversations evolve and themes emerge, we accumulate new people, flex to individual interests, and contribute to existing local projects we discover as we grow. A living process. Participation is about being involved. Collaboration is about working together. This project tests methods of design collaboration, endeavouring to ask questions about how we can create, think and work together; rather than define solutions to pre-set problems. What can we learn if we let ourselves be led by the hedge? https://www.kirstybadenoch.com/blog-1 daily 0.75 2017-05-05 https://www.kirstybadenoch.com/publications daily 0.75 2025-12-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1505579607786-FCBJ4W5PUIFKNAHI8663/P2137126.jpg PUBLICATIONS   PARADISE LOST In August 2013 I embarked on a research expedition to the abandoned island of Kandhulhoodu, a remote and barely-documented speck of land lying in the North of the Maldives, the lowest lying country on Earth. Kandhulhoodu was once home to 3000 people but has now been abandoned, deemed officially unhabitable due to water intrusion. The old island town now lies deserted in ruins - barely documented, overgrown and increasingly inundated by water. The islanders have over the past ten years been gradually relocated to a nearby, previously uninhabited island in a combined charity-and-government-led project. This development of a new town from scratch provided an sadly missed opportunity to build in tempo with the distinctive local water behaviour and tidal land shifts. Unfortunately, the project was controlled by foreign forces and did not take into account local knowledge, building techniques or an appreciation of the moving landscape nor changing seascape. The new island, Dhuvaafaru, is in high danger of submergence as one of the lowest in the atoll, and due to the building process the natural protective vegetation and protective encircling coral wall was completely destroyed, and the ground level has now been levelled and lowered further still. The new island town sits even more perilously close to sea level than the former, the defensive coral wall around it dying, and the tidal sands constantly reshaping its borders. The community now faces a future just as precarious as their past. This is a place where man is in continual battle with the sea, and people move futilely from place to place, caught in a cycle of resistance and abandonment. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1506075223670-MXYA9PETAATZ7K1GLLCY/P4149144.jpg PUBLICATIONS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1505580202415-Q8ON6MLG88SVYV0G3EVV/01+copy.jpg PUBLICATIONS   PARADISE LOST (II) In February 2015 I embarked on a research expedition to the abandoned island of Genmendoo, in the Raa Atoll of The Maldives. Gemendhoo was once a fishing village of 460 - large by local standards, and one of seven inhabited islands within the atoll. Most of the villagers were families between five and ten people, living in one- or two-room houses. The 2004 tsunami destroyed every building on the island and took with it eight lives, including two babies. Genmendhoo was abandoned almost instantaneously, and the majority of the population rehoused by the government on nearby Kudahuvadhoo, the atoll Capital. Gemendhoo is part of a line of eleven closely-connected uninhabited islands running north to south. During low tides the sand flats which run between the islands are exposed and a thin connecting sand passage opens up, allowing the islands to be walked between along for a stretch of 7 kilometers from Bulhalafushi in the north to Naibukaloabodufushi in the south. Each island is covered by dense rainforest, coconut plantation and an abundance of mosquitoes. I was lucky enough to access the island to photodocument the remains of an otherwise deserted paradise. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1516786155292-4VGK741KQ8EOL71U4WHU/IMG_4230.jpg PUBLICATIONS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1505557071951-UHKGYCJWYOSDZ1GJ2J1C/11.jpg PUBLICATIONS   DRAWING AS ACTION Aqua Fluxus investigates a poetic cartography of turbulance, chaos and fluidity through the act of drawing. The drawings develop non-physical, experiential mappings of places that are continuously reshaped by the interplay of extreme force and fluidity - of event, encounter and adaptation toward the unpredictable. The works explore active methods of capturing time and event through the act of drawing as a performance in itself. How can we map a place that is more clearly defined by it's undergoing continuous change than by it's physical form? By configurations and relationships that change daily, that through traditional cartographical approaches would require constant drawing and redrawing? Can we instead record a place as a set of fluid actions, interactions and memories?   Through the Aqua Fluxus paintings, my artistic methodology works to develop an approach that enacts an abstraction of the forces and events that create a place to generate emotive cartographies. Allowing for chance, accident and interpretation, the drawing methods are seen as a set of ongoing experiments whereby the process is as crucial as the end result. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1683409434452-TPGSEHBRPVCH9VDJHLVA/Book.jpeg PUBLICATIONS ‘Cartographies of the Imagination is a wondrous collection of introductions to potential architectural novels. Written and crafted in drawings, models, installations, 3D scans and collages, this atlas of 33 mapping projects tells tales of fact and fiction. Gardens, the Silk road, Europe, Asia, a cottage, New York, debris, atmospheric curiosities, archaeology, volcanic islands, female cities, ghost cars, cosmic maps, the unconscious, golden clouds, lakes, geological monuments and the moon, are amongst some of the characters these projects narrate with. The settings are real and imagined, poetic and critical. Lost lands and the importance of going nowhere. Reconstructed spaces by acute observation and the dissection of shadows and their shadows. Improbable maps that act as rehearsals for the creation of places. Re-remembered bodies; versatile vessels that bring together improbable routes for future explorers. And sometimes, the most mysterious thing about a half-place, the place that exists between the real and the imagined, the fact that it’s not mysterious at all. The direction these mapping projects take suggests a measure of the world which is not settled. Where symbols shift, data is poetically gleaned and softness prevails.’ The Cartographies of the Imagination book presents an atlas of alternative maps, gathering over thirty works from the worlds of architecture, landscape, painting, sound, technology and film. Navigating across scales, times, realities and the imagination, this book charts practices and processes of cartography, challenging the outer reaches of human exploration and the definition of a map. The book accompanies and inspires the festival conversations. The Cartographies of the Imagination book has a limited availability, if you are interested in purchasing a copy please email cartographiesoftheimagination@gmail.com. Foreward: Ifigeneia Liangi Introduction: Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah Lines that lead / Footsteps that follow: Alberto Ponis / Kirsty Badenoch / Dr Jonathan Prior / David Heymann / Sam Coulton / Paul Kolling / 3RW Arkitekter / Richard John Seymour Forensic reconstructions: Peter Wilson / Aisling O’Carroll / Dr Izabela Wieczorek/ Francesca Benedetto / Mallory Burrell / Pui Quan Choi Worlds that whisper / Lands that lie: Madelon Vriesendorp / Saskia Olde Wolbers / Melissa McCarthy / Mira Sanders / Peter Baldwin / Dana Burdman / Dr Penelope Haralambidou Retracing familiar ground: Charles Robert Cockerell / Zaha Hadid / Doug Specht / Sayan Skandarajah / Nat Chard / Sean Steed / Dr Christopher Fry / Erika Brandl-Mouton Guides for getting lost: Guy Debord / ScanLAB / Eloise Maltby Maland / Llew Watkins / Sapna Marfatia/ Charnjeev Kang Afterward: Keranie Theodosiou The publication was launched in 2021, with support from LAHP and Drawing Matter. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1699265673212-EWDUB1UMH9SBVGMVW8E0/To+an+Island_Kirsty+Badenoch_Tom+Jeffreys_01.jpg PUBLICATIONS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1728768375509-R2U1V32R8YLONN1FQLG9/Tataputarcny_KirstyBadenoch13.jpg PUBLICATIONS The Likan Antay tribe of the Atacama plains are not people of the desert but people of water. Tataputaracny resides here as guardian of the water, a formless spirit snake of the river. Permission must be asked before crossing her body. The river maps are drawn over the course of three weeks on OS map papers, walking up and down the former flow of the dry river bed of Rio San Pedro. Footstep on footstep on footstep turns to flow. One-off map in four interchangeable parts. Charcoal, graphie and colour pencil on OS Map Papers, 1000 x 890mm. Made as part of the La Wayaka Current Residency, Chile 2024. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1751382175304-621LGJBJP5SVZ8BWFZK0/IMG_0782.JPG PUBLICATIONS A visual-textual journey through the “Land Lines” workshop, hosted at Drawing Matter in February 2025. To mark the passing of Alberto in Autumn 2024, we traced their footsteps and fingerprints from London to Sardinia and back. Working with Ponis’ pathway drawings in the Drawing Matter archive alongside geological maps of London and Sardinia, we drew time-and-space connections. We embarked on drawing “walks” together, exploring ideas of drawing-as-listening, and observing-as-designing. The workshop was embodied, involving physical as well as metaphorical walks, and drawing at 1:1. We worked with originals from the Drawing Matter Collection – the Ponis’ original drawings, and John Ruskin’s rock collection. Limited edition copies available on request, please email kirstybadenoch@gmail.com for enquries https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1729412313094-V3DGF0BK54N8A5HHX77S/A+Common+Way_KirstyBadenoch_01.jpg PUBLICATIONS This is a set of walks that encourage going off-piste, walks that invite you to unite as part of nature. Walks through which to meet and learn the unusual beings that dwell deep within the woods, and within yourself. This deck explores our relationship with the woods through the ideas of queer ecofeminism – acknowledging the diversity of the natural world, blurring boundaries, and treading with openness and respect. At its heart, tarot is a storytelling device. A deck of symbols and narratives that can spark conversations, inspire ideas, and reveal new perspectives. This “walking tarot” invites you to go one step further – it invites you to enact whole new stories of care for the woods, for ourselves and for one another. Drawing on the ancient wisdom of tarot and of Britain’s wild lands, these cards have been written through conversations with the communities of the ancient Forest of Hatfield, and drawn over long nights camping out in the British woods. These are walks that invite care for the woods, for ourselves and for one another. A small-batch limited edition tarot deck by Kirsty Badenoch with Wayward, Published by Mouldy Books. Created through a commission by National Trust and Essex Cultural Diversity Project, supported by Arts Council England. Purchase link here! https://www.kirstybadenoch.com/participation daily 0.75 2025-03-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1683412152820-EUQQ3SEP448TCQJGZ639/DSC05629.jpg PARTICIPATION 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 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1683414351715-8J22OK0W9P643N3R8FWF/KirstyBadenoch_Woods01.JPG PARTICIPATION 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1683412875578-KV3C6MNX52TX2W11XXZS/KirstyBadenoch_COTI+Drawing02.jpg PARTICIPATION 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.’ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1697313864143-FNH5AXOOJJZIKE8S4GPG/Granby_Kirsty_Badenoch_03.jpeg PARTICIPATION Liverpool School of Architecture / Granby Winter Garden 2021 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1697323225642-SWJY0HQAOS8SYCHQAMTR/03_06.jpg PARTICIPATION 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1704650452770-BHO9HM5MXNYNTSEF2D8A/KirstyBadenoch_Unbuild_Undraw_DrawingRoom03.jpg PARTICIPATION https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1704651259924-PRGH9RP3F6JUMI8DDOH9/KirstyBadenoch_NLA06.jpeg PARTICIPATION https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1718143330184-I66045XTUC1TE9J3EKMD/Embodied+Fluidity_Kirsty+Badenoch01.JPEG PARTICIPATION 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1718143731328-SKS18MTQH6MGVOU5VGH8/Drawing+Space_Kirsty+Badenoch_Andre+Roach_01.jpg PARTICIPATION 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1718144660295-8IGE71ZOJ4X6PVF9FUUR/Embodied+Drawing_Kirsty+Badenoch01.png PARTICIPATION 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 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1740578452484-D598OBR6FWL8HYF9RVET/DSC01104.JPG PARTICIPATION Land Lines: Drawing as Working the Land was conducted at Drawing Matter in February 2025. Based on the working drawings and design processes of the late Alberto Ponis and his wife Annarita, and the time I spent with them at their home in 2021, the workshop explored ways of reading, walking, and drawing with the landscape. Alberto and Annarita's drawing, designing and building processes are deeply rooted in place - connecting local landscape knowledge with organic modernism, ecology with geology, craft with weather with wild. To mark the passing of Alberto in Autumn 2024, we traced their footsteps and fingerprints from London to Sardinia and back. Working with Ponis' pathway drawings in the Drawing Matter archive alongside geological maps of London and Sardinia, we drew time-and-space connections. We embarked on six 1:1 drawing “walks” together, exploring ideas of drawing-as-listening, and observing-as-designing, and seeking new ways of engaging across species, geologies and ecologies. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/590c53b786e6c071a64a08d1/1741612835860-X89RFN7NF3SNMA1EBUCH/01_Myths_Mosses_Kirsty+Badenoch.JPG PARTICIPATION The ideologies of queer ecology open to variations and nuances beyond scientific categorization, ingrained societal norms and fixed structures. They embrace fluidity and interspecies empathy by acknowledging alternative forms of gender and connection. As the darkness and quietness of the night enveloped us, we shed our human skins. Winding through folklore, stories, meditations and mediations, we grew roots, ate like leaves and slowed down to plant time. An alternative workshop for Chelsea Physic Garden as part of their “A Dash of Lavender” programme, February 2025. https://www.kirstybadenoch.com/about daily 0.75 2026-01-06