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Reading Landscape
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22 January 2027
Reading Landscape: A Field Guide for Artists, Architects & Designers explores how creative practitioners interpret, construct, and reimagine landscape through acts of making, observing, mapping, walking, drawing, and environmental engagement. Bringing together artists, architects, landscape practitioners, and designers, the collection examines how creative practice can function as a way of reading landscape: not only as physical terrain, but as cultural text, ecological process, and site of memory, imagination, and transformation.
Rooted in contemporary Scottish contexts while engaging broader environmental and interdisciplinary concerns, the volume considers how climate, culture, terrain, and material histories shape relationships to place. Across reflective essays, visual projects, and practice-based “field actions,” contributors explore how artistic and spatial methodologies generate situated forms of environmental knowledge and reveal patterns, histories, and relationships that conventional disciplinary approaches may overlook.
Organised around themes including ecology and stewardship, landscape and memory, and poetic approaches to mapping and meaning, the book moves across architecture, landscape architecture, environmental art, design research, and interdisciplinary place-based inquiry. The collection foregrounds creative practice not simply as representation, but as an active mode of translation and engagement through which landscapes are experienced, interpreted, and contested.
Combining theory, practice, visual materials, and pedagogical experimentation, *Reading Landscape* offers an accessible and visually rich contribution to landscape studies, environmental humanities, creative fieldwork, and practice-led research. The result is a collection that invites readers to approach landscape as a dynamic site of ecological, cultural, and imaginative possibility.
ARCHITECTURE / Landscape, Landscape architecture and design, EDUCATION / Schools / Levels / Higher, ART / Techniques / Painting / General, NATURE / Ecology, History of art, Higher education, tertiary education
Carol Elkovich is an artist, writer, and scholar whose research and practice investigate intersections of materiality, cultural hybridity, and environmental consciousness. She is Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, USA, where she teaches across fine art and design disciplines.
Foreword
Dr Mark Eischeid
Introduction
Carol Elkovich
Part I. Ecologies of Care: Sustainability and Stewardship
Chapter 1. Inklings of Knowledge
Justin Carter
Chapter 2. Empowered: Sustainability & Power
Marianne Greated
Chapter 3. Terra Incognita
Carol Elkovich
Chapter 4. Reading Opacity
Dr. Jen Clarke
Chapter 5. Practicing Otherness
Collins + Goto
Part II. Layers of Time: Landscape, Memory, and Conflict
Chapter 6. Eventual Sites
Michael Mersinis
Chapter 7. Catalyst for Thought: Quiet Observations
Lesley Punton
Chapter 8. Latent Histories: Local Walking
Nicky Bird
Chapter 9. Nomadic Dialogues
Sue Brind & Dr Jim Harold
Chapter 10. Optical Spectacular
Chip Sullivan
Part III. The Poetic Terrain: Mapping Meaning
Chapter 11. Rhizomatic Methods
Shauna McMullan
Chapter 12. The Hidden Landscape: A Brief for Action
Alan Hooper
Chapter 13. Something Hangs on: Practicing Archaeospectrographv
Gina Wall
Chapter 14. Reading Landscape: Systemic Recordings on Place
Brian Evans
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index