Unmapping Landscape: Commoning the Peak District Moorland through Convivial Wildness
To ‘unmap’ landscape is to dissolve the distance created by the God's-eye map and the viewer: to see yourself in direct relation to Land and the entanglements it holds. This multimedia project reimagines landscape conservation in the Peak District moorlands through the dissolution of private property, speculating on the possibility of multispecies commoning through the construction of drystone structures and embodied mapping practices. It takes the form of a three-channel film that simultaneously depicts independent and collective in-situ tests and filmed 1:1 charcoal drawings, where the moving camera and the projector become countermapping tools that recreate the moorland landscape as a projective space.
The project rejects the concept of wilderness that enforces a separation between humans and nature, instead proposing ‘convivial wildness’, where convivial at its root means to live together, and wildness signifies the interdependence of human and other-than-human worlds. Further, it imagines a shift from commodified tourism to ‘transient commoning’, where visitors to the landscape become part of the ecological repair and re-storying of the moorlands, now largely maintained for grouse shooting. Commoning within convivial wildness, then, means practicing ways of being collectively with each other and with the more-than-human realm, making space for alterity while recognising our interdependence.
Unmapping Landscape was featured in the Museum of Enclosure, an exhibition at the House of Annetta in London in November 2024. The project was completed in 2024 at the Architectural Association.
What happens when a drawing’s lineweight meets landscape? By projecting the ordnance survey onto a wall in the AA, the Peak District is reconstructed within the studio space. Zooming into the map, boundaries appear and disappear as they pass through fields of legibility. This durational map, mediated by the eyes of the projector and the camera, exposes the false precision presented by the static survey.
A catalogue of existing stone structures in the Peak District. Scanned unfolded booklet of digital drawings.
Stills from the filmed 1:1 commoning cairn sectional drawing. I project mosses, mammals, and birds onto the charcoal drawing, showing it as a scaffold for multispecies cohabitation.
A 1:1 charcoal and chalk drawing of a drystone commoning cairn for multispecies cohabitation in the moorlands. 1.2m x 2.3m.
The field stations begin to appropriate existing stone structures, supported by timber scaffolds from local conifer plantations that appear and disappear alongside the construction and maintenance of the drystone. Here, we see a grouse shooting butt turned into a cairn, sabotaging its utility for hunting. Graphite on cartridge paper, 210mm x 297mm.
When visiting the moorlands, I begin to imagine maps everywhere. I make them by stacking stones from broken walls into cairns, attuning myself to their collaboration with gravity.
I build a cairn and trace all one hundred stones before I stack them, making a template of my immediate geologic surroundings. Caught in the transition between broken wall and aggregation—between enclosure and marker—the tracings become a selective blueprint to this specific place in the moors.
The third cairn, made with one hundred stones from a broken stone wall.
Collective imprint-map made in situ by rubbing a drystone wall with charcoal.
Collective drawing of a 1:1 field station. Charcoal and chalk on paper. Thank you to Sharvaree, Hafsa, Elise, and Bastien.
An unfinished landscape: drystone field stations stiched across the moorland landscape in a constant process of building and unbuilding. Graphite on cartridge paper, 594mm x 841mm.