Land Studio
Awarded the 2023 Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Prize in the Interdisciplinary Category!
Judges’ comments
A beautiful initiative, bringing so many different groups of people together – resulting in important real outcomes.
A wonderful collaboration - generative work harnessing the energy of community, collaboration, and care for place.
Camping to change the world…” *
Land Studio is a program that mingles art, science and land restoration. Land Studio camps tend to be 3-4 days in length and take place on farms and other rural landscapes. They bridge the city/country divide and bring together students, volunteers, farmers, Indigenous custodians, scientists, local community, artists and anyone else interested in regeneration. Each camp incorporates practical projects that restore degraded land as well as workshops, campfire talks, walks and artist-led activities. This mix supports knowledge exchange, experiential learning and a rich encounter with many dimensions of land stewardship.
Click above to read about the Land Studio ethos in this article from the KSCA publication ‘An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar’.
Land Studio camps have been staged in 2020, 2021 and 2022, in Wiradjuri Country in the Capertee Valley, and Gundungurra Country, Hartley in NSW. They have been coordinated by Laura Fisher and Lucas Ihlein. Each involved around 30 campers and local participants from organisations like Capertee Valley Landcare and the North East Wiradjuri Cultural Centre. Amongst our campers were creative arts and Geography students from the University of Wollongong. The first camps were made possible by the ‘Land Studio Pilot Project’, which was funded by the NSW Government through its Increasing Resilience to Climate Change Community Grants Scheme. Take a look at the videos and blog posts below.
Each Land Studio camp is a creative collaboration that plots a more positive future for a patch of land. We think artists are an untapped resource who can spur innovation and bring positive energy to the cooperative task of caring for land and creating sustainable change. In a few years, we would love artist-led Land Studio camps to be happening all over the place, giving lots of people the opportunity to contribute to land restoration and climate change adaptation in rural Australia.
If you have a land restoration project in mind and would like to host a Land Studio camp, or would like to bring a group to participate in one, please write to us at info@ksca.land, or laurafisher50@gmail.com. We can send you information about the costs involved and practical requirements to run one safely and successfully.
Land Studio was featured as a case study project by Adapt NSW. Video by Justin Hewitson.
Land Studio 2020. Videography by Justin Hewiston.
Drawing a contour line - project led by Leanne Thompson at Land Studio 2020. Videography by Justin Hewitson.
A highlights video created for Adapt NSW by Justin Hewitson.
*This quote pays tribute to social ecologist, polymath and trouble-maker Stuart Hill’s essay ‘Camping to Change the World’ Australian Journal of Outdoor Education, Vol. 8, Iss. 1, (2004): 60-61,63-65,67-68. Clear here for a PDF of this wonderful article.
Other remarkable projects that have been sources of inspiration for Land Studio:
The Ecosystem Restoration Camps established by ecologist John D. Lieu.
Rural Studio, an off-campus citizen-architect program run by the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture of Auburn University.
The Archstoyanie Festival of Landscape Objects in Nikola-Lenivets, Russia.
Kultivator, an artist cooperative located on a farm on the island of Öland, Sweden.
A video about KSCA’s 3rd Land Studio camp in Hartley, NSW at the farm of Erika Watson and Hayden Druce in Hartley, NSW. A romp stomping good time where we reimagined fencing as a an artform among many other wonderful things!