Mosaics, Patches and Patterns
Citizen scientist artists create Landscape Rehydration puzzle
Every week when the Mulloon team engage with landowners, students and the community we ‘paint a picture’ of how landscapes were in the past, how they might look in the future, and the connections between different parts of a landscape. With our Citizen Science project, Laura Fisher is keen to develop visual tools to support these conversations.
Digital tiles designed by khalkeus. (Image: https://khalkeus.itch.io/3d-hex-tiles)
One of our art/science collaborators Josh Harle proposed we look at boardgames in which players build a landscape, piece by piece, and swap landscape features in and out (like Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan). We also looked at video games like Sim City which allow you to build a virtual landscape and transform it in response to certain events, like a flood. An idea was sparked when we saw that video game designers often work with hexagon tiles to depict landscape features because they tessellate, offering six potential edges of interaction between the tiles (as shown below).
Creating landscape tiles
Laura ordered some wooden hexagon tiles and invited artists Angela South, Georgie Pollard and Hugh Tory to participate. She shared images of the features of healthy and unhealthy catchments, like erosion gullies, riparian zones, swampy meadows and degraded streams. Each artist has produced tiles that are strikingly different and beautiful.
A tile by Georgie Pollard.
Angela South said, “The process of depicting these landscapes in an educational way is new to me and was an exciting challenge. It’s allowed me to branch out and experiment with new materials and a modular display format.”
Hugh Tory, “found it really fascinating learning about geomorphology through the painting process”.
And Georgie Pollard shared these thoughts: “It’s nice to think in terms of relationships and layers. What is done to one tile has to be applied back to the other ones. It makes me think about in the landscape, what we do over here has an effect over there.”
A tile by Hugh Tory.
Tackling landscape ecology, one hexagon at a time
Ecologists Metzger and Brancalion tell us that landscape ecology is about, “understanding the landscape as a mosaic of interactive landscape units” (1). Knowing how the landscape is spatially structured is a key to planning effective restoration projects, and that structure can be described in terms of patches, corridors, steppingstones, mosaics and plant assemblages. The way Angela, Hugh and Georgie have tackled this art/science challenge suggests we might be experimenting with a new kind of landscape painting that can illustrate these concepts in a very engaging way.
Tiles by Angela South and Hugh Tory.
Our Landscape Rehydration puzzle will keep evolving, with high school students contributing later this year. Eventually we hope we can construct a variety of landscapes, and swap tiles in and out to talk through different scenarios of change, plant communities and rehydration strategies. We'd also like to see if we can develop more sophisticated modelling features or develop a digital version with design students at university. It’s an iterative, co-creative process!
This ‘Modelling Landscape Rehydration for Catchments, Communities and Curriculum’ project has received Citizen Science grant funding from the Australian Government.
RESOURCES
Metzger, Jean & Brancalion, Pedro (2016) ‘Landscape Ecology and Restoration Processes’ in M. Palmer et al Foundations of Restoration Ecology Island Press, Washington, 90-120.