Kat Hill: On solitude and encounter: observing places with curiosity and care

This talk and seminar will explore my creative practice focused on small spaces and specific localities as a way of examining the entangled human and non-human relationships in a place, and stimulating conversations around care and responsibility, to others and to living worlds. At a time of environmental and climate crisis, I am interested in how the acts of curiosity and creativity can offer a way of understanding and reframing our relationships to places.

From mountain huts to repeated walks along particular paths, I will examine these as places where we may often be alone, consumed by our own thoughts or retreating from modernity, if just for a moment. But also, as places where we encounter beyond-human worlds and other people on our journeys, if only for fleeting moments. Drawing on my residency at the Woods and my wider creative non-fiction work, my talk will explore how we as practitioners might read landscapes and localities through experience, research and observation; how we record and respond to the shifting temporalities of a place, its rhythms of dwelling, sensory worlds and its many actors; and how that conversation about curiosity and observation may make us sensitive to the entangled practices of care and damage that are threaded through our relationship with landscapes in the current climate.