Raising awareness and appreciation of Scottish Peatlands
Carys Mainprize and Kerry Morrison. Education and Communications Officer and Socio-Ecological Artist
Stand Look Twist Throw Quadrat crosses air Quadrat lands I look What’s in there Cotton grasses Sedge Sphagnum Heather Sundews Slug Insects – tiny Water Peat Quadrat lands Where quadrat falls I draw Seven times
Kerry Morrison 2024
Peatlands inspire action, whether that be education, the restoration of degraded peatlands, the uncovering of past life, or creating work that reflects peatlands through the lens of an artist.
During my time of peatland explorations, I have become really aware that a lot of people are unfamiliar with peatlands or have heard about them and have heard that they are important, but don’t necessarily know why peatlands are special. The importance of peatlands is clearly articulated through the sciences. Science sheds light on the value of peatlands, for example, niche biodiversity, carbon store, gases exchange, and hydrological functions. However, when talking the science, you can sometimes see people glaze over. Artists, scientists, and educators coming together expand peatland narratives. As we talk together, sharing anecdotes and peatland perspectives we take our stories into a hyphen space (the space where disciplines link together with a hyphen, for example, socio-ecological). Through a multivocal approach, peatland narratives diversify. Expanding the narrative extends our vocabulary, which in turn can enable integrated approaches whereby, for example, the educator incorporates an art technique, the artist incorporates scientific methods, or the scientist embraces anecdotal storytelling. Alongside extending our vocabulary and ‘tool-box’, we can stand together in the same space supporting one another; drawing on our strengths. Combining ways of knowing peatlands broadens the scope to engage those who are less familiar with these landscapes.
On World Bog Day, an artist, an educator, and peatland restoration ecologist came together to celebrate peatlands and share their enthusiasm for these landscapes through combined approaches.
World Bog Day is celebrated around the world every year on the fourth Sunday in July.
This year, to celebrate, Kerry and Carys travelled from the South West of Scotland to Shetland to experience the peatlands of the far north and to share their methods of connecting people to peatlands through education and art approaches.
Map from Google Maps
Kerry and Carys work for the Crichton Carbon Centre (CCC), a not-for-profit environmental organisation based in the southwest of Scotland. CCC is well known for carbon management, peatland restoration and training, and environmental education, collaborating with government agencies, private landowners and farmers, as well as other NGO‘s. CCC’s Mission is to inspire action, keep carbon where it belongs and repair nature. Within this framework, CCC seek to continuously extend and evolve their network and recognise the importance of reaching young people and wider communities. This is where art, specifically social art and ecological art practice, as well as education, come in. CCC’s affiliation with art approaches developed more fully through Peatland Connections, a three-year funded project through the Galloway Glens Landscape Partnership scheme. Embracing Natural Capital, biodiversity, and cultural values, CCC, with Galloway Glens, wanted a project that was creative and innovative in its approach and able to communicate with new audiences about peat and climate change. Through arts and sciences approaches, Peatland Connections created and delivered a series of actions, events, and conversation pieces; curated and produced by socio-ecological artist Kerry Morrison. Peatland Connections concluded in December 2023, and in February 2024, Kerry was offered a permanent post as socio-ecological artist, enabling CCC to continue to develop creative approaches to connect and reconnect people to peatlands and continue pro-active conversations and actions in a time of climate crisis, soil crisis, and biodiversity crisis.
Carys Mainprize develops, and delivers, the CCC education programme. Working with young people, primarily in schools, the education programme embraces curiosity and play as a way to learn the – at times dense and overwhelming – topics linked with the climate crisis. Pupils create 3D models of ecosystems, play board games about removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and create self-portraits out of nature materials, which are made from carbon just like us. Ultimately, we don’t connect with what bores us; this is even more true for our young people!
In some respects, Kerry and Carys work in the liminal space of peatland restoration. This isn’t the ‘doing’ of restoration but alongside those at CCC who do, and so have developed a knowledge and understanding of the whole peatland restoration process, some of which appears to have been absorbed though that strange kind of osmosis, which comes from being embedded within a team. Kerry and Carys use this knowledge, integrated into their areas of specialism (art and education), to increase awareness and understandings of these rare and vital landscapes and the climate change challenges we are experiencing.
Now that Kerry is a permanent member of the team, Kerry and Carys can explore working collaboratively. This process is already well underway with the creation of a peatland restoration card game – one of Carys’ many innovative initiatives. A road trip together to Shetland provided much wanted time to delve deeper into collaborative possibilities, bounce around ideas, test new approaches, and share our way of working with others involved in peatland restoration: CCC is quite unique in-so-much as it has both an education and an art strand. World Bog Day was the perfect framing for this.
Travelling to Shetland, our first stop was Forsinard Flows, the RSPB reserve in the Flow Country, the UK’s largest blanket bog, which, just after we visited, was awarded UNESCO World Heritage Site status. From here we slow travelled to Shetland.
A handfuls of cotton grass seeds. Photo: Carys Mainprize
Our World Bog Day celebration, in partnership with Shetland Amenity Trust Peatland ACTION Project Officers Sue White and Ash Lynn-Tavene, began on Saturday 27th July at Shetland Museum and Archives in Lerwick. We set up a path of peat for visitors: a bucket of sphagnum, its colours a shock of red and greens; cotton grass heads in a jar like an Instagram influencer’s kitchen; heather on the cusp of blooming; wet peat; dry peat; bog wood 3000 years old; and a series of one metre deep/long peat cores taking us back some 1000 years. We had flags available for people to write historical or ancestral events and mark it on our peat core timeline. It became populated through the day, including one Australian visitor’s mark of when her great, great, great grandfather was deported to Australia for stealing a goose and three goslings to feed his family.
Peat Core with flagged dates pertinent to participants. Photo: Kerry Morrison
During the drop-in workshop, we engaged with twenty-five people. The conversations were deep and engrossing with learning travelling between all of us. One man shared that his nephew-in-law was happy to have settled in the UK because of the colours of the moorland he saw from his office window. Another spoke about his career driving diggers and recognised the challenges that peatlands would give to heavy machinery. One woman, from Skye, worried about the impact of multiple proposed wind farms on their peatlands. We used the many drawings that Kerry had created for our card game (more on that in a future post) to illustrate the narrative of peatland restoration: Here, this is what a degraded feature looks like; we call it a hag. There is how we make the sides less step, and then we do this to hold water back. Afterwards we hope it looks like this, wet and full with sphagnum.
Our World Bog Day celebrations continued on Sunday 28th with performative drawing on a peatland near Girlsta (recently restored by Shetland Amenity Trust). The performative drawing activity was mirrored in Galloway by Kerry’s partner, artist Helmut Lemke.
At the Girlsta bog, the land dips down to a lochan, and slowly rises again to meet a distant horizon. On our right, a fence line cut across the land marking a boundary between restored and unrestored peatland, a neat juxtaposition. The harsh cuts and erosion features suddenly smooth out, like contractors had simply taken a rolling pin to the land, fixing the degraded terrain.
Kerry throwing a quadrat, process and performance, World Bog Day. Photo: Carys Mainprize
Kerry, on the low-lying peatland, experimented with movement and science. Kerry held her quadrat[1] high and turned ever so slowly, giving a weight and reverence to the random choosing of the next subject. A purposeful twist to the side and then the quadrat was tossed, in much the same way that an ecologist would, and Kerry explored what it framed. Helmut performed the same exercise on degraded bog in Galloway.
Throughout, Sue (Shetland’s Peatland Restoration Officer) and Carys chatted about their connections with peatlands to visitors including Roxane Permar (Artist, Research Fellow, Reader, and Programme Leader for the MA Art and Social Change). Sue gave Roxane and the young couple who visited with her a guided tour of the peatland, introducing them to bog specific species and features, and explaining peatland restoration processes and healthy peatland functions. This was a great site for that, standing on a restored peatbog with the scarred and degraded peatland clearly visible to the right. They peered over Kerry’s shoulder as she drew a bog orchid (Hammarbya paludosa) with graphite, charcoal and wet peat from the pool it grew in. Art and ecology merged in our conversations. Listening to each other talk about topics we were unfamiliar with broadened our knowledge and connectedness to both art and peatlands. Concurrently, as Kerry drew on a windswept Shetland peatland, Helmut navigated the precarious nature of a severely degraded peat bog, alone, on a hotter than average day in Galloway. Helmut’s performative intervention went unadvertised; no human audience or conversations with people but witnessed by critters of the bog and birds overhead, with the insects participating much in the same way as the wind participated in Shetland. Kerry and Helmut’s bog duet is part of a series of performative actions in response to their surroundings; working title: near – gentle, close – recording.
Kerry drawing (detail). Photo: Carys Mainprize
World Bog Day 2024 presented an opportunity for us to engage with peatlands in multiple ways, combining different approaches and sites. For Kerry and Carys, the expedition into new peatland territories (the peatlands of the South West differ enormously from those we encountered in the Northern Isles) triggered conversations about aesthetics and appreciation, and peatland narratives. Inspired by the landscapes encountered, the landscapes we know, the people we met, and the conversations we had with each other, ideas for future projects and collaborations are in the making.
[1] Quadrats are used by both artists and scientists to define a field of study – usually the ecologist casts it on the ground to define a specific area in which to for instance count species, whereas the artist will often use it to frame a view.
ecoartscotland.net 
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