Making of a Meadow is composed of a body of creative work (photographs / writing / documentation) and ambitious series of public events, that took place in the Kent Downs National Landscape between Summer 2024 and 2025, funded by the RCA AHRC Impact Acceleration Account in collaboration with the KDNL. The project is underpinned by a consideration of open field poetics and guided by a close reading of the work Fabrique du Pré by Francis Ponge, contributing to current thinking about plant intelligence, vegetal aesthetics and the power of geo and biodiversity. The project seeks to expose and reflect upon methods of creative fieldwork defined by cross disciplinary collaboration co-created through public events and workshops, furthering understanding about the relationship between practice led research, co-creation and impact activity. The project exemplifies and tests approaches to creative research within National Landscape frameworks and proposes ways of sharing and attending to these landscapes to build awareness and understanding of the importance of biodiversity. Artists Jessica Potter, Sara Trillo, Alison Neighbor, Alise Kirtley, and Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright) worked with different publics to engage with geo and biodiverse habitats. The workshops extended sensory responses to landscape through walking, notation, musical composition, experimental photography and approaches to language. These workshops resulted in the creation of a collective cyanotype quilt, a song for an Oak tree, scores for meadows, a phytogram animation and the design of a physical and digital meadow notebook for public use. This article advocates for interdisciplinary and immersive creative experience as essential in re-enchanting and re-learning about landscape to support and extend biodiversity literacy and practice.
- attnention
- photography
- biodiversity
- geodiverity
- plant thinking
- Kent Downs
- Chalk
- creative engagement
The Making of a Meadow is an expansive research project developed in 2024, culminating in the Language and Landscape Impact Fellowship, in 2025, funded by the AHRC Impact Acceleration Account, RCA, in collaboration with the Kent Downs National Landscape. The project consisted of collective public events led by selected artists across the KDNL. The KDNL is applying for UNESCO Geopark status in 2025 and these creative projects form part of a body of evidence demonstrating the importance of the relationship between creativity, geodiversity and biodiversity. A key aim of the project is to provide creative engagement within the bio and geo diverse habitats of the Kent Downs in support of this application. The project also supports creative learning through the design of an educational resource for the KDNL (the making of a meadow notebook) for schools and the public to use to encourage, celebrate and attend to geo and biodiversity. This article evaluates creative methods of attention to support a greater depth of literacy, both textual, sonic, visual and linguistic, raising awareness of the vital importance of bio and geo diverse habitats to the health of the world in both human and planetary ways.
UNESCO Cross Channel Geopark / Restorative Art Practice
Making of a Meadow is an expansive research project designed to support the KDNL Cross Channel Geopark application through creative engagement and impact activities. The KDNL comprises of a range of different habitats including largescale arable and dairy farms, controlled grazing, protected sites of scientific interest, coppiced woodland, nature reserves, riverine habitats, water meadows and small scale organic and permaculture holdings (Rebel Farm). Making of a Meadow highlights the importance of embedding creative practice within the fabric of our National Landscapes, expressing and experiencing the diversity of these habitats and the importance of their entangled and intersecting forms of life. The project developed attentive ways of engaging with those habitats through observation, notation, gesture and light sensitive materials and processes, expanding and creating biodiversity literacy. A key aim of the project is to develop and share creative ways of attending to the diversity of life, awakening senses and minds to planetary processes through the co-production of a Making of a Meadownotebook to be shared digitally through the KDNL education resource and physically with local schools and community organizations.
UNESCO global geo parks are ‘single unified geographical areas where sites and landscapes of international geological significance are managed with a holistic concept of protection, education and sustainable development’. Geology connects these aims with the life of the planet giving a planetary perspective on our human relationship with it. The UN defines these areas as using their special geological characteristics to support, share and respond to key issues facing our world. These include supporting social and cultural engagement with geo and biodiverse habitats, improving diversity of access in support of social and cultural diversity and inclusion, as well as enabling education and understanding of the importance of these habitats. Geoparks also address critical challenges facing society including restorative and sustainable use of natural resources, responding to natural hazards and developing resilience in the face of the effects of climate change. This relationship between local contexts connected to a global network, empowers communities to love, protect and support local habitats, species and environments.
The Cross-Channel Geopark application unites the Kent Downs National Landscape with Caps et Marais d’Opale Regional Nature Park in ‘celebration of shared geology and heritage’, specifically the chalk landscape that, since the Cretaceous period, has connected Southeast England with Northern France. Chalk is made of compressed coccolithophores, small organisms that rained down onto the ocean bed and formed the chalk we see today in the white cliffs of Britain and France. This chalk is a connective element that once formed a land bridge across the channel. The geo park application shares the story of the Mega Flood which 450,000 years ago, due to post glacial warming, broke through the land bridge connecting Southern England with Northern France with huge force and created the English Channel. The story of the mega flood alongside the celebration of chalk habitats is key to raising awareness of their special characteristics, supporting connection across borders and planetary thinking about human and interspecies relationships. Coccolithophores today are also a key indicator of climate change, and so this project brings the planets deep past together with current ways of measuring and understanding our changing planet.