For many years, I have worked professionally with landscapes, reading sites, understanding their structures and histories, and transforming them through design. Alongside this professional life, I have always made things with my hands: stitching, felting, printing, painting, working with clay, and more recently constructing textile objects and sculptural bags.
I have never experienced these as completely separate worlds.
Even when I sit at my table with fabric, wool and thread, making something rooted deeply in memory and identity, my years of professional practice have never really left the room. The landscape architect is still there: thinking about relationships between parts, proportion, geometry, layers, boundaries, material, structure, rhythm and transformation.
And perhaps the artist has always been present when I have looked at landscapes too.
Sense of Place
Looking back, I can identify certain anchors that have shaped the way I see and work. Some came through education and professional practice; others through books, people and places. Some are cultural and others deeply personal. They did not necessarily seem connected when I first encountered them, but over time their relationships have become clearer.
One of those early anchors was Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar’s The Sense of Unity.
I was fascinated by its exploration of Iranian architecture and the relationships between geometry, spatial order, nature, symbolism and meaning. It offered a way of looking at architecture that went beyond buildings as physical objects. Space could belong to a larger cultural and philosophical understanding of the world.
Years later, while working in Abu Dhabi, I had the unexpected opportunity to meet Nader Ardalan. By then the book had already become part of my intellectual landscape. Meeting one of its authors gave an abstract influence a very human dimension.
What remained with me was not a collection of forms to reproduce. It was a way of looking for relationships and meaning.
This connects closely with another idea that has followed me throughout landscape architecture: sense of place.
A place is never simply the physical space occupying a set of coordinates. Its identity emerges through topography, vegetation, water, climate, materials, patterns of occupation, culture and history, but also through atmosphere, associations and memory.
When we intervene in a landscape, we are therefore never really beginning with an empty surface.
Landscape as Palimpsest
This is why I am drawn to the idea of landscape as a palimpsest.
The word originally describes a manuscript that has been written upon, erased and written upon again, while traces of earlier writing remain.
Landscapes behave in much the same way.
A path disappears, but its alignment remains visible in the terrain. A river changes course. Agricultural boundaries become lines of mature trees. Buildings disappear while their edges survive in walls, foundations or changes in level. New generations occupy a place differently from those who came before them. Vegetation grows, infrastructure is added, materials weather and functions change.
One landscape can contain many landscapes.
Professional practice taught me to read these layers. Existing trees, levels, drainage patterns, boundaries, materials, circulation routes and traces of former uses are not simply obstacles to a new design. They are information. The designer has to decide what should remain, what can change, what might be revealed and what can be reinterpreted.
Over many years, this became more than a professional method for me. It became a way of seeing.
The Invisible Layer
There is another influence that is harder to locate in a particular book, project or period of my career: my personal beliefs.
I have always been receptive to the possibility that what is visible is not necessarily the entirety of what is present.
Meaning can exist beneath a surface, in memory, symbolism, relationships, absence and traces. Something does not necessarily cease to exist simply because it is no longer physically in front of us.
I find something very similar when I read landscapes.
What we see today is only the current manifestation of a much longer story. Earlier layers may have disappeared physically and yet continue to influence what exists now.
Memory works this way too.
We do not preserve our experiences as complete and accurate photographs. We carry fragments: a colour, a smell, the geometry of a garden, the texture of a carpet, a river, a doorway, a pattern, a particular quality of light. Some memories remain extraordinarily clear; others become obscured beneath what came later.
Perhaps we ourselves are palimpsests.
From Landscape to Material
This is where my professional practice and my making begin to overlap most strongly.
When I work with textile, I am again working with layers.
Fabric is folded, cut, stitched, covered, joined, repaired and transformed. One material sits beneath another. A seam records an act of joining. An exposed edge reveals construction. A fragment belonging to one context can become part of something entirely different.
I find myself using processes remarkably similar to those through which I understand landscape.
But there is an important difference: when I make, the material is often carrying something intensely personal.
A Persian pattern, the memory of a carpet, a colour associated with a place, the geometry of a garden, a landscape remembered from another period of my life. These references enter the work, but I am not interested in reproducing them literally.
Memory itself has already transformed them.
So I allow them to be transformed again.
Through stitching, felting, crochet, folding, printing, painting and assembling, fragments are broken apart and reconstructed. Geometry may become irregular. A recognisable motif may become almost abstract. Something culturally familiar can reappear in an unfamiliar material or form.
In this process, technique is not separate from concept.
Stitching joins. Cutting interrupts. Folding conceals and reveals. Repetition creates rhythm. Layering allows one thing to remain partially present beneath another.
The physical vocabulary of craft becomes a vocabulary for thinking about memory.
The Geometry of Memory
Over time, I began to call this body of thinking and making The Geometry of Memory.
The geometry is not simply geometric pattern.
It is the structure through which fragments relate to one another: how memory is organised, disrupted, repeated, concealed and reconstructed.
And memory, for me, is not nostalgia.
I am not trying to return to an earlier place or recreate something exactly as it once was. I am interested in what happens to places, patterns and experiences after we have carried them with us for years, sometimes across countries, professions, languages and different stages of life.
What remains?
What changes?
What disappears?
And what unexpectedly returns?
Making gives those fragments another physical existence.
In that sense, perhaps making is a way of keeping something from disappearing.
Between Art, Craft, Design and Landscape
I increasingly find it difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to draw a firm boundary between my landscape architecture, art, design and craft practices.
They use different scales and different materials. One may involve a public landscape and another a piece of wool held between my fingers. One requires technical drawings, coordination and construction knowledge; another may begin intuitively with a piece of fabric.
But the underlying questions are surprisingly similar.
What is already here?
What traces remain?
What should be preserved?
What can be transformed?
How do separate elements relate to one another?
How does material carry meaning?
And how can something new emerge without completely erasing what came before?
My years of professional work in landscape architecture have therefore never been away from my making. They are embedded in it, just as my memories and cultural references are embedded in the way I understand landscape.
Perhaps professional identity itself is a kind of palimpsest.
Education, books, mentors, encounters, landscapes, cultures, beliefs, professional practice and personal experience accumulate over time. Some influences remain clearly visible. Others disappear beneath later layers, yet continue quietly shaping what comes afterward.
For me, sense of place is about recognising the particular character and meaning of what is there.
The palimpsest is about recognising the layers that remain from what has been there before.
And The Geometry of Memory is about what happens when some of those layers are carried within us and reconstructed through making.
They are not separate ideas.
They are different ways of reading the layers.