8. Kirsty Badenoch

Artist, Educator, Author, Publisher
London - UK

‘Ecological Foray’

Kirsty has a fascinating background. This has involved her transitioning away from practising as an architect, to an artist. She works with “fragile and disturbed landscapes, territories, communities and ecologies.” In the interview, you can really begin to see the relationship between specific books and her overarching work. It is an absorbing insight into the ‘slow burn’ of literary references and the impact they have on shaping your practice.

In Kirsty’s instance, her practice is varied, consisting of “drawing, designing, making, talking, writing, performing and planting.” Kirsty creates site specific artworks, utilising time and the natural world to leave marks, forming a dialogue between herself and nature. She has also written and published books, most recently, ‘To an Island in a loch on an island in a loch’ (2023) with Tom Jeffreys on her own imprint, Mouldy Books. Previous publications have included ‘Cartographies of the Imagination’ (Self-published, 2021), and the triptych series, ‘Disappearing Islands’; I: Kandhulhoodu (2013), II: Genmendoo (2016), and III: Heimay (2017).

Alongside this, Kirsty teaches on the BSC Architecture and Interdisciplinary Studies (Design and Creative Practice), MSci Architecture, and research thesis for MA Landscape Architecture courses at The Barrett, UCL. She also regularly undertakes drawing workshops, which has included sessions at Drawing Matter, Omved Gardens, Granary Square and Flimwell Woods.

I wanted to start with this book, ‘The Images of Architects’ by Valerio Olgiati (Quart Publishers, 2013). Olgiati invited 44 architects to select 5 images each that they found inspirational. I thought it was a humble way of curating a book. What struck me was how personal the images are; a painting the guest saw when they were 16, or a postcard their mum sent them. Very specific memories. Often people feel like they have to play into a formal process, but the simplicity of the task made it much more personal.

It is interesting how people are more willing to open up through an image in that way.

Exactly. It is vastly more enjoyable to talk about that, rather than what you do. Rather than explaining the thing, you are talking about the things behind it; being curious about other people’s worlds. It is about a decade old now, but I remember Olgiati discussing how enjoyable it was to make. It became an invitation to get to know someone.

The 5 images appear to tie into one another quite often. There is a sensibility across the 5 images.

Definitely. I quite like reading it as an archive.

I’ve been thinking about books since your invitation to have this conversation and I realised that my books are always full of the places where I read them. This is a good example, ‘Silence’ by John Cage (Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1995), a set of essays and lectures I read when I was travelling in Japan to see a garden project. It was very silent. The book is a bit of a mess now as it has ended up with more leaves in it than pages. I quite like this process. I used to be a real perfectionist with books, I didn’t want to make a mark on them. But now I quite like how through reading, the book is ingrained with the place. The memory of how you are reading it.

With that process in mind, that book feels quite poignant. There is a lot of white space and so much of Cage’s work is around the user and their own experience. As a book it feels like he is creating space for you to add your own narrative, to weave within his words.

That’s true.

You mentioned that you used to be quite a perfectionist, has the work of John Cage been influential in you moving away from that? Does that coincide with you distancing yourself from the world of architecture? Or at least, moving further to the edges. It feels like there is a correlation between these elements.

There has been such joyful unlearning. I think everyone does it at different scales and at different ages of their life. My background is straight up architecture, but I think the way I approached it was always from a slightly odd angle - mixing different influences and playing with them in different ways. Particularly in the last few years, it has felt liberating to fully accept those oddities, to think about what influence these other voices have. Perhaps less so in an architectural world, but instead maybe in a public space, or in an environment. I'm still trying to work out the vocabulary for it. It is where practices, like John Cage’s, that are deeply ecological, become important. There is no sense of self, or ego, or even final output, it is just relentlessly inquisitive.

It is driven by process. You have touched on it slightly, but I was interested in hearing more about your artistic practice and its relationship to architecture. Was there anything in the architectural world that pushed you into a more artistic practice?

Definitely. It feels like there is a deep conflict within the practice of architecture. When you are in university, it seems to make sense; you are engaging with anthropology, weather, tectonics and the negotiation between actors. I have worked in some quite straight-up practices and others that have been broader: landscape, urbanism, masterplanning… it does feel slightly odd putting the disciplines into boxes. It becomes very outcome orientated, which I think leads back to your question, because if you are aiming towards an object at the end of the day that you can ‘sign-off’ and ‘hand-over’, take some photos and forget about, then it kind of negates the point. I don’t know whether what I do is architecture or not, but I think we need to challenge our thinking, which can be quite difficult to do in practice because you are bound by a number of forces, things like the RIBA. Their work stages literally show a point at which your ‘investment’ is complete. It is worrying!

That process does not promote humility in any way. To actually talk to someone about what could work better, or be changed…

It is such a strange practice, because you are meant to be creative, yet utterly diplomatic. You are not meant to compromise a vision, yet also have incredibly strict material and physical budgets. You are meant to convince someone that you absolutely have the answer, yet no one ever does, or will. So, I don’t know. It feels like you are acting. It is an incredibly knotty place to be. I think the way the system is set up, it doesn’t allow for deep, deep questioning and listening…

Which university does in many ways. I know it is very intense and the pace of it can seem unrelenting, but there is a freedom to how you can work, or the topics that you can cover.

There is a freedom to it. It is the most amazing education you can have. I still believe that. You engage with everything; how something works, how it continues to work and how it could work in the future. You then enter the system of architecture and it is not that. So, I am relentlessly trying to prod it from different angles

Has there been any literature that has been influential in your transition to a more artistic practice? Anything that has instigated change in the way you think, or that allowed you to free yourself?

Can I talk about John Cage again?

Absolutely.

This book is absolutely the most wonderful thing, ‘John Cage: A Mycological Foray’ edited by Ananda Pellerin (Atelier Éditions, 2020). It is critical. It is personal. It contains a variety of voices, weaving together mushrooms and minimalist music. It is doing exactly what I feel I am trying to do; to move away from a world of known references. I want to stay open, humble and curious to explore these incredible new connections.

To look at the same thing but through the lens of a different world.

Exactly. I think it has been through looking at things that are peripherally touching architecture, but not quite touching it that I have found most useful. There are essays here by Cage but what I am really interested in are the memories. These tiny thoughts he divulges:

“A mushroom lasts for a very short time. Often I go into the woods thinking after all these years, I ought finally to be bored with fungi. But coming upon just any mushroom in good condition, I lose my mind all over again. Supreme good fortune, we’re both alive.”

I find architecture quite strange because no importance is placed on tiny moments like that, emotional things. It doesn’t feel like there is a place for that, but there absolutely should be. Instead you have to do one size fits all. You are never allowed to say, ‘I found this mushroom and it was amazing.’

We have become so disconnected from our landscapes. The humbling nature of a landscape feels even more important, to remove that sense of ego…

I think you are right about being humbled by what we can’t control. There have been times when I’m eager to make work in the River Lea, but I can’t because it's been raining for three days straight and the weir system has been let out upstream, meaning the river is incredibly high and fast. All these processes are happening, which means I can’t just ‘get what I want’. Urban ways of thinking involve these processes, but for me, they don’t resonate in the same way. I find landscapes incredibly direct. Both visceral and now. There may be a million various delays on an architectural project but it goes through all these indirect filters. It is a very different type of uncertainty.

I have always been much more interested in theories coming from ecology. In terms of relating this thinking to urbanism, there’s a lot of great thinking by Richard Sennett. He talks about disorder through the meeting of disciplines; understanding that there are all these different ways of thinking. Learning how you can apply that to your own medium is the tough part. Sennett’s book, written with Pablo Sendra, ‘Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City’ (Verso Books, 2020) felt like a critical reference point for me. Maybe it is interesting because he’s not an architect.

He gets involved in the messy side of urbanism. The side that a lot of architects, in particular, don't want to talk about.

Exactly. Other urbanists, like Jan Gehl, don’t really get under the skin of the problem. They are quite high level. I remember feeling frustrated that there wasn’t much literature on public space and what I felt landscape architecture to be. The landscape architecture section of bookshops often has some lovely things about gardens and maybe some beautiful photography books on Piet Oudolf’s work, but then it sort of stops.

I think it’s an industry that has so much potential. It feels like it has been neglected for a long time and in many ways misunderstood. This touches perhaps on what you have been discussing, but recently I’ve been reading a lot around the topic of contingency and how for a long time architects have refused to deal with it. There are a number of recent practices that are seemingly embracing it and responding to it in quite a dynamic way. I mention this because I read a beautiful passage in ‘2G 89: BAST: No. 89. International Architecture Review’ edited by Moisés Puente (Walther & Franz König, 2023) where they discuss marking the pooling of rainwater on a pavement. There solution was simple, to add a drain at that point. That, for me, demonstrates the poignancy that landscape architecture can have.

Which is exactly how it should be. Why would you redo all the drainage?

It feels like that sense of place, through time spent on site is critical in that regard; it has been shaped by humans ie. pavement, and it is pooling as a result, through a fault or misjudgement, but I thought the idea of embracing that incredibly interesting.

You can only really get that understanding by being there, by being in the environment. I think the environment side of architecture has taken a backseat and it needs to be the driver. It is the most important thing. Do you know this book? ‘The Inhabited Pathway: The Built Work of Alberto Ponis in Sardinia’ Edited by Sebastiano Brandolini (Park Books, 2014)

Only through research for this interview and reading your Drawing Matter essay.

I’m glad you read it. I was incredibly lucky to go and stay with his family after Niall Hobhouse from Drawing Matter put me in touch with Alberto and his family. They let me into their life completely. I learnt about him through Drawing Matter and his drawings. I had no idea who he was, which feels mad because he’s incredibly famous in Italy. He is the architect of Sardinia. When I first saw his drawings, you could really feel where they were produced. There is so much spirit in them. Alberto and his partner, Anarita, have an amazing respect for the land. When they receive a commission, they go and clamber the rocks of this inhospitable, but beautiful terrain. The pair would walk the coast, often in silence, sleeping amongst the rocks. Over time, they developed an intimate understanding of place. It doesn’t feel like a contemporary, western way of relating to land at all. It feels quite unfamiliar to us, but it is formed from a deep familiarity of how humans connect with their environment. I was blown away by it. One element of their ethos is a huge respect for rocks. They never cut a rock unless it is absolutely unavoidable. In doing so, they create buildings nestled among the outcrops, as if they have sprung from the land. This is set against the context of the Italian hill town where buildings perch on top of a hill. In that sense, their practice is incredibly radical.

Although it really shouldn’t feel radical; to be in tune with a place.

It’s that amazing feeling where someone has done something so perfectly simple that it makes you wonder why any of us have got it so wrong. You look out to Canary Wharf and wonder, how does that exist in the same world as this? [Ponis].

With the yacht house, they poured a tiny, meandering concrete path through the rocks. Alberto was there, every morning at 5am with the concrete pourer, literally pointing the way. There is a love present in the work, realised at the scale of the terrain, but also at a micro scale. I think for me, that is the joy in working in landscape architecture, for want of a better term.

It is all about the meeting of these things, to understand the scale of the system you are intervening in. How you are part of a watershed, part of a tectonic plate, deep time ecology. It is critical to understand that you are only intervening for a very small amount of time and then you will go away. Ponis works to the micro scale, pouring concrete around a single daisy, for example. This is where I am at with my own thinking. When I think about how slowly the discipline is changing, I look to people like Ponis for inspiration on how to shortcut the system.

This is the drawing that really gets me. He would fold this drawing up each time he went out and work over it. There were no maps at the time, he drew the whole thing, photocopied it. Each time he went out he would think about where steps were required, or how the building could settle into the landscape.

Such a slow process. I think the idea of experiencing a landscape like that, every day, is such a unique experience. You get to see it when others wouldn’t, because of that deep connection. I had something similar to this with Hackney Marshes, which for a period of about two years, I visited every day. I remember one particular moment, early morning where the sun had risen but there was a metre or two of fog settled on the ground, which the sun was reflecting off. It was sublime, a rarity in London.

Rare to see, or rare to notice. Awe is such an important emotion. You feel it in your belly. Deep excitement or deep connectivity. You are right about Hackney Marshes, it is such a special place. That reminds me of Mary Oliver and a beautiful practice of hers; she would often walk in the woods near her house. Meticulous about her craft, she would write religiously every morning and then spend the afternoon in the woods. She didn’t want to put pressure on herself to come up with ideas whilst in the woods, nor did she want to feel inspired and have no way of recording it. So, she would hide pencils in the trees, knowing that if an idea visited her, she would be able to record it. It is fascinating to think about ideas like this when discussing creativity. I can open worlds to you, but you also have to find your own position within that world.

How are these books influencing your own practice? Are you using literature in a creative way? I know you were working with Tom Jeffreys on ‘To an Island in a loch on an island in a loch’ (Mouldy Books, 2023), where he was writing and you were responding to those words. Was there any specific literature involved with that? Or are you looking more at technical information to then build fictions around?

I can talk about the book a little bit. Interestingly, despite what all the reviews say, Tom and I did all the writing together. If it was only Tom, it would have defied the point of the whole project, which was about the marks, traces and language of the forest. Ecosystems that we can’t necessarily understand. It was a project from the heart and soul. We drew and we wrote and we drew and we wrote each other's drawings and we drew each other's writings. We mapped each other's walks. It was an organic but deeply reflective process, whereby at the end we couldn’t tell who had done what. It also involved recording conversations we had together and with other people. We had a huge Google Doc, which Tom then crafted into something and then gave it back to me. It was a reflexive process. Sometimes the marks lead one another, sometimes they interrupt. There was a lot of consideration around the white space. It sounds cliche, but we did see the whole thing as a landscape. Because it is, it leads you somewhere, you might have to struggle up a hill and then suddenly it all makes sense as a view opens out. The whole thing has a rhythm. We worked hard to make the layout of the text have a relationship with how the land was ploughed. I think, for me, influences are slow burners. I know how much John Cage has influenced what I do, but it is actually only now that this book is here that I begin to realise just how much.

Níall McLaughlin talks about the idea of loam during his interview and relates his use of books to that; of knowledge seeping in, without necessarily feeding directly into a project, or a particular narrative. The plant doesn’t necessarily know about the soil, but it is completely necessary.

That is a beautiful way of describing it.

Which is what you are discussing, the way in which knowledge infiltrates…

I think that is the most interesting thing and perhaps one of the reasons why my library isn’t organised. Sometimes you can see some semblance of order but it quickly evaporates. It would be nice to do a mapping of where the books have ended up over time. There have been various orders and none of them conform but that feels like a part of the way of thinking, rather than ‘this is a book about architecture so it goes in the architecture section’.

There is an interesting display at the Sitterwerk Foundation in Switzerland, called ‘Dynamic Order’, which Rosie Ellison-Balaam of Folly told me about. Each book is chipped so you can see a live recording of how the library moves and shifts.

That sounds amazing. It is quite obvious that the world you are immersed in is going to influence you and it makes sense that there are different scales to that. There is the longer term, whereby literature you have read for a long time has an influence, or the process of working on a piece for a long period of time, but there is also the chance encounters - a collection of weird poetry that you might find in a charity shop and read on your way home. I like that these chance encounters can sit alongside your other reading. I think there is an intriguing clash between the two different worlds.

There was an amazing quote from Ifigenia Liangi about your publication, ‘Cartographies of the Imagination’ (Self-published, 2021), “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.” The scope of work you are interested in is incredible. What is feeding such an intent?

I think I’ve talked about the intertidal zone before but I am feeling it at the moment. There is a sweet spot where you are in the intertidal zone, where sometimes the ocean, or the river, rises and submerges you. As it falls away again, you dry out with it. Sometimes, the geek in me wants to know everything about a certain subject, so that will be through books, but also a lot through conversation. I think a lot of my practice has involved finding a specialist in a particular topic and trying to understand it through their eyes. I have a lot of geeky books about specific places, largely written by retired men. They have very strong opinions and extensive footnotes. A realm of laminated over-obsessive literature. That is maybe where the sea comes up and you are immersed in it, but I think it is really important to let it fall away again; to not know toomuch. I think naivety is really, really powerful. It is what gives children a deep connection. I am absolute in trying to retain my naivety as an adult. I’m incredibly protective of it. This means that sometimes you have to push away knowledge, to allow yourself to have creative freedom and to pull together different parts from various disciplines. It is all about developing a working method of exploration.

Through speaking to people you are instantly connected to someone’s personal experience, which feels particularly poignant when thinking about landscapes and ecology, because these people are experiencing that place, or system. They are perhaps looking at a place quite scientifically, but there is already fiction involved, as they are telling you a story.

That’s true! It can also shortcut knowledge. You may be reading a book from a renowned publisher and it’s been through a two stage peer review process, therefore it’s ‘credible’. And then you can talk to someone who’s out in the field, that has been dealing with this subject directly and they may have a completely different opinion. That is crucial. Sometimes you don’t notice the bias in a book, or that a topic has been simplified to appeal to a wider audience.

This leads me on to this book. Again, I don’t know how well known he is in England, Charles Moore. A lovely book called, ‘Chambers for A Memory Palace’ written by Moore and his friend Donlyn Lyndon (The MIT Press, 1996). It is quite simple - letters sent between the two of them about the places they visit. The idea that they are writing to each other fills me with joy. There is space for the individual and the individual's experience.

…and a wide variety of stories. Both the scientific and the personal; the objective and the subjective.

Exactly. It really makes you listen. Perhaps that is why a lot of my influences come from music, because it is about listening, rather than imposing. I do have a significant collection of architectural theory, but I have left it at my Mum’s house. I find the ego in it too imposing, particularly within modernism. The architectural literature that has made it here is when somebody is doing it slightly differently, in their own way.

It really is a beautiful collection of books you have; books that I feel are only going to become more and more relevant. I was actually thinking about this today, but what literature, or references from today’s era, do you think will become canonical? For me, something like ‘Cambio’ by Formafantasma (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2020) could be, because it marks a specific moment in history. This idea of understanding how everything is connected feels quite unique in today’s society, when everything has become so intermingled and interspersed.

That is such a powerful question. It’s always easier to look backwards and see what they were. But now?

A book like ‘Lo—TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism’ by Julia Watson (Taschen, 2022), for example, does not feel as powerful. There was a lot of hype around it when it came out and obviously the ideas behind the book are amazing, but it felt quite disappointing as a publication.

Absolutely. It felt like a coffee table read, really. It is charming, but it doesn’t delve deeply enough into how it is relevant now. It is more like an anthology.

I think that is what's so amazing about ‘Cambio’, it treads a fine line between being instructive and abstract. It feels like you can use it in a variety of ways. This relationship between books and the climate crisis is interesting, about how they become useful.

It is really difficult because we are in an era where information is rife. We are drowning in an ability to access. You can get it all if you want, but what do you then do with that? The role of making feels very different now. I guess that is what Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour did in ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ (The MIT Press, 1968), where they moved through space and speculated on what it meant.

Of all the canonical texts, ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ feels like one that is more relevant than ever. Like you said, the ego in modernism doesn’t sit well with the issues we face today. It highlights the power of the book to present curated and digestible knowledge. Perhaps that is why books are more important than ever.

Definitely. The internet has almost rendered itself useless. It’s like the most sickly birthday cake, with every topping imaginable. You can’t digest it. I want to go outside and find a nice apple.

Thinking about canonical texts, I’d go non-architectural - ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Princeton University Press, 2021) springs to mind – mushrooms again! It explores the unexpected corners of capitalism through the commodity chain attached to mushrooms. This includes interrogating rare species, mushroom farming, how mushrooms are valued, treasured and threatened, ultimately feeding into the contemporary restaurant trade. Environmental relationships have been corrupted by commercialisation.

I feel like there are other mainstream books that have hit a nerve; Merlin Sheldrake’s, ‘The Entangled Life’ (Bodley Head, 2020), Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ (Penguin, 2020)…

Isabella Tree’s ‘Wilding’ (Picador, 2019)…

Exactly. And I am happy that they have hit the mainstream, as they are critical topics.

Definitely. But again, it can help advance their commodification. Knepp, the location of Wilding is an example of that, which has now become, in part, a glamping site. They have commodified the rewilding process. Equally, it has done a lot of good and has put an ecosystem in place.

I’m trying to think of contemporary thinkers that might be similar to Venturi, Scott-Brown and Izenour writing ‘Learning from Las Vegas’. I am wondering whether it is not one person, one godlike figure to revolutionise how we see a certain thing. Maybe it is a genre, or a community of thinkers rather than one specific book or solitary writer – it feels like we’ve left that idea way behind.

Interesting. One example, which I know is a specific book, but feels like an incredibly collaborative project, and practice, is Material Culture’s ‘Material Reform’ (Mack, 2022). Cambio also feels poignant in this regard, as it isn’t really about Formafantasma, instead about the people they are interviewing, or asking to write essays.

Exactly - decentralising.

I’ve spoken about this book before in interviews, but there is a brilliant book by Sussanah Hagan called ‘Revolution: Architecture and the Anthropocene’ (Lund Humphries, 2022) where she talks about the all encompassing power of modernism and how it completely dominated the canon, and in many ways still does. She questions why sustainability hasn’t had such a profound impact when it is so critical.

It’s very true. I think because modernism is brutal, it’s in your face, it’s hard, it's powerful…

It’s also quite simple - Le Corbusier’s 5 principles…

Exactly. Then you had groups like FAT, who are brilliant thinkers, but created work that was easy to grasp that fitted into the world of advertising and the idea of urban utopia. It was built on positivity, where sustainability, at the moment at least, is inherently not. It is incredibly complex and requires a lot of attention. There is a lot of guilt involved.

That was something that I found really interesting about your project, ‘New Lohachara’. The idea to embrace climate change as a fictional narrative. It is a point that Sussanah Hagan makes about sustainability and its quite singular avenue of net zero, bio-based materials etc. There needs to be room for fictions and storytelling, to try and alter the narrative.

There isn’t really a value system to judge that; social sustainability compared to material sustainability. What you see isn’t what you get. Things like biobased materials are great in some ways but absolutely horrific in others. Do we need to skip that step and actually look at the bigger picture - is a building actually needed? Or, do we need to change our processes? We need to go to the cause, rather than sticking a plaster over a small part of the problem.

I think that is where modernism excelled; they had concrete to build with, which was completely embraced by the construction industry, governments, lobbyists… It was all encompassing. Obviously, timber has negatives, as well as positives, but it feels like there needs to be a timber revolution but it isn’t gaining the support it needs. Similarly with stone, there is no power-backing.

It needs to be about balance and respect. It isn’t about monopolising on one thing. Balance is key - you take an amount, you get back an amount, which is quite boring [laughs]. It’s not like modernism and concrete where you suddenly have this abundance of a material.

It is based on an exchange.

Exactly. A lot of the practices creating amazing work, like Assemble, or Material Cultures, are on the peripheries. They have a practice that can be considered architecture, but it can also be considered many other things: material practice, social practice, environmental practice. You need to be able to have a foot in the architecture world, but also your other foot and both your hands in something else, because the framework of the British architecture system is inherently not sustainable. Of course there are anomalies, amazing pioneering green thinkers who own loads of land…fantastic. The base level is set extremely low. As I’ve become involved in public sector work, I have realised the brutality of it all. It is incredibly upsetting. The architect’s role you learn about in university is a multiplicity of things, yet you find yourself so far down the food chain. It has led to amazing initiatives, like Public Practice, where people have set about to get involved with decision making and influence the system.

The agency of the architect has dwindled massively. I’ve got friends now moving into development and it does feel like there is a lot more opportunity to influence change.

I think that is where architecture needs to not defend itself relentlessly and back itself into a corner, where historically it has done so. There are some amazing thinkers who are moving away from this, but I think if it keeps falling back on its traditional ways of a singular genius then it will quickly find itself becoming less relevant. That is not how societies need to operate moving forward. The course I teach at The Bartlett is called ‘Architecture and Interdisciplinary Studies’, we work with students from all departments across UCL – anthropology, DNA sciences, music … It’s amazing what happens when you bring all those voices into the room. Now all we need to do is lose the ‘Architecture and” part of it.

All photography by Tim Lucas unless otherwise stated.

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8. Kirsty Badenoch

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