The Making of a Meadow Impact Acceleration Account Fellowship is a body of creative work (photographs, writing and documentation) and a series of public events, that took place in the Kent Downs National Landscape between summer 2024 and 2025.
At a glance
- Making of a Meadow is an expansive research project designed to support the Kent Downs National Landscape Cross Channel Geopark application through creative engagement and impact activities.
- Making of a Meadow 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.
- Workshops were developed in collaboration with the Kent Downs National Landscape, resulting in the creation of a collective cyanotype quilt, a song for an oak tree, scores for meadows and the design of a physical and digital meadow notebook for public use.
- The project exposes and reflects upon methods of creative field work defined by cross disciplinary collaboration co-created through public events and workshops. 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 Fellowship was funded through the RCA AHRC Impact Acceleration Account award.
Key details
Gallery
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The challenge
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 (KDNL). 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.
Our approach
Slow and experimental photographic processes alongside writing, walking, sensing and collective musical composition, took place over the course of the year 2024–25, supporting diversity of access to the National Landscape.
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.
Making of a Meadow workshop for children was developed in collaboration with Lady Joanna Thornhill Primary School, Wye in the KDNL. Years 5 and 6 (120 children) were taken out of school for the day to take part in a guided walk and series of creative exercises that wove together learning about the geology of the local landscape with creative forms of attention. The length of the workshop was important for experiencing the time and light of the landscape, to support attentive and careful engagement with its material qualities, spending time walking and navigating its different habitats but also listening to and learning about the ways in which the children related to the habitats around their school.
Outputs
- Making of a Meadow article for Arts Journal,
- Making of a Meadow exhibition as part of the KDNL Geofestival held at Dover Castle, November 2025.
- Making of a Meadow presentation as part of the Restoration Dialogues event held at Cambridge Conservation Initiative.
- Making of a Meadow digital notebook and folding posters shared with KDNL as part of their digital educational resources.
Team
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