How can sensory oriented taxonomical registrations, such as tactility, address the gaps in representation of heathland habitats?

Heathland habitats have a sense of mysticality around them due to their remote nature. They are often found in rural places that have harsh environmental conditions such as high exposure to winds, high rainfall and higher altitudes. They also often thrive in areas with high human disturbance such as grazing and peat cutting. However, due to the limited accessibility of these heather landscapes and heather species, they lack diverse representation and perception.

The mysticality that I am talking about surrounding heather landscapes stems from these landscapes lacking visual definedness and contrast. Heather species have very little deviation in terms of size and therefore create a landscape that has little visual references of scale. Heather species are also a quite dense and intricate form of vegetation which often leads to their visual opaqueness from a distance. They are read as a flat and monotone landscape that is defined more so by the form of the topography such as the silhouettes of the mountains or dunes rather than the silhouettes of the heather plants themselves. It is exactly these unique qualities of visual vagueness that adds to the ambient, almost fairy-tale-like, sense of mysticality around these landscapes.

However, these heathlands are commonly only perceived from eye-level (e.g. hikers) from a distance on footpaths and rural roads. It therefore limits the current representation to a certain scale of distance and fails to show the true intricacies and beauty that heather vegetation beholds.

With this project, I use photography as a research methodology to discover and understand the changes in qualities of heather landscapes as the distance is altered. Therefore, the controlled variable of this experiment is heathland habitats. Another controlled variable is the use of orthogonal views as opposed to perspective, to allow for an unconventional perception of this landscape. The independent variable of this experiment is the distance at which I photograph the environment. I will be registering the environment from 3 different distances. I will be using a drone camera and a digital hand-held camera to achieve and document these parameters and visual data. The photographs are presented in a booklet.

The conclusions from the photographical experiments will be used to create 3 sculptural interpretations. Each sculpture conveys and registers the key physical, visual and tactile elements that define the specific qualities at each scale of heather landscapes. The outcome is a method that is critical of current modes of taxonomical registration.

The place of inquiry is the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland. I went on a field trip to do the research. I will be visiting the heather-filled landscapes of Glencree, Sally Gap and Kilmacanogue. It is the place that has inspired this project. 2 years ago, I felt this intense sense of mysticality and intimacy on a solitary bicycle trip through these mountains of Wicklow. Being half-Irish, it is also a place filled with immense personal memories and nostalgia. It is a landscape heavily represented through oral histories of long traditions of peat cutting and commonly portrayed as a backdrop in Irish landscape paintings. Many of these oral and visual documentations are often told at my grandparents in Dublin.