The WaterLands Studio has explored the remarkable aqueous landscapes of Northern Ireland over the last three years. By simply following the water: tracing and drawing the coastline facing the Atlantic and North Channel; mapping the inner space of Strangford Lough; following the Lower Bann as it moves through towns such as Portglenone and Coleraine towards the sea; charting the remarkable space that is Lough Neagh, with Toomebridge at its northern shoreline, and the sense of the sacred at Church Island and Lough Beg beyond; we have aimed to explore through the studio work a complex physical and associative landscape, rich in potential, but often overlooked and unseen. 

Our focus this year began at the source of the Bann, in the Mourne Mountains as it flows to Lough Neagh and beyond, before circling back to consider the relationship with Newcastle and the wider landscape of the Mournes.

The different communities, ecologies, geographies and narratives of these unique places -all formed around the presence of water- are rich in both history and meaning and become slowly revealed to us in our continuing journey to explore the possibilities of these unique locations. We take inspiration from the cartographer and artist Tim Robinson who explored the west coast of Ireland across three decades of work, through walking the landscape, writing about it in forensic detail, gathering the knowledge implicit in the placenames and memories of people, in order to make his remarkable hand drawn maps. Our studio is named after a glossary (III) in Robert Macfarlane’s book LANDMARKS, which gathers words that describe water through different languages and dialects. Macfarlane was a great admirer of Robinson’s ability to ‘deep-map’ in both word, and drawing.

Water is present in all aspects of our studio. The hydrological cycle as the continuous process in the homeostasis of water, is akin to that of the nature of design: the circling in of ideas like clouds forming, the constant return to beginnings, and the interdependency of place, geography and the environment in re-making and re-thinking architecture.

Students work together across the different year groups through a series of projects which set out the basis of an evolving conversation about architecture and about the studio themes and drawing as a form of research. In semester one we started by looking at a 15th Century painting reinterpreted as social distancing, then a book by Nan Shepherd called the Living Mountain, before embarking on making a collective large scale abstracted map of the Mourne Mountains. All three of these things are connected through drawing, and the interpretation and translation of ideas, across time, and geography. This conversation through drawing begins to position students in a much wider discussion. In semester two we explored Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp as a landscape (rather than seen from the perspective of chronological history) as both a mountain and a water gatherer. Taking a fragment of a plaster model of the church made in Le Corbusier’s studio in Paris as a beginning and which is now in the Drawing Matter collection, it opened up a material discourse of new readings and interpretations. We then remade and redrew key contemporary buildings to get to know them similarly as ‘landscapes’, of social space, of materials, of different environments and contexts, and to get to know them beyond the obsession of architecture as ‘image’, and to usefully inform the projects that would follow. Our working method is essentially thinking through drawing, and making through drawing. We see models as a form of drawing. While we are interested in the specific nature of the hand drawn, and all of its tacit knowledge, all tools -digital and analogue- are used in the studio, and become mutually supportive and interdependent. 

After this series of short introductory projects, the students set off on their own trajectories across WaterLands.

The first years celebrated and heightened the presence and qualities of water along the Upper Bann as it falls towards Lough Neagh with their water pavilions, before moving to the Silent Valley, deep in the mountains to make a new educational visitor centre.

The second years explored differing scales of projects dealing with Art. They are introduced to artists who teach in the Belfast School of Art and for whom they have to design a studio, before moving up different scales to make a poet’s and artist’s retreat on Church Island, and then finally a gallery of Modern Art for Northern Ireland in Newcastle.

The third and fifth years worked together in what essentially are thesis primer propositions, developing their own briefs from their research, and collecting shared information, collaborating on strategic drawings, and linking together in their different locations and projects such as along the seafront in Newcastle.

The final year work takes this to a different level of development and research, and like Tim Robinson seeks a deeper form of ‘mapping’ of their ideas, and project resolution. They importantly bookend, as such, the studio’s collaborative space, that reaches from a first year new to the subject, through to a final year thesis student immersed in their research and thoughts. The studio acts like a creative practice, combining the knowledge and expertise of the established postgraduate students with the nurturing and mentoring of the energy of the novice first year.

Water was seen historically as a means of communication and connection. What to us may seem remote, was once well connected, and well travelled through the invisible infrastructure of the international sea roads. Islands were once seen as importantly connected: physically and philosophically, not disconnected by water. 

The subtext this year of the studio was, Islands that are not Islands. Like the giant pools of water contained in the Mourne Mountains, which can only be seen from the air -individually shaped and distinctive, but collectively part of a much larger ecology- so too are our students, connected across the creative space of our WaterLands III SuperStudio.