Cartographies of the Imagination

Community workshops

2 / 15 / 16 / 25 July 2021


A number of day and half-day drawing workshops run by Cartographies of the Imagination curators Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah invited local schools and youth groups to join us on a voyage of experimental world-building. Together, we explored processes of drawing and map-making and travel between seen and unseen worlds, creating maps between the real and the imagined. 

In the garden workshops, we explored the relationship between drawing and nature, and engaging with the magic of the gardens within which the festival is set. Through found and made materials from the garden itself, we invited a group of creatives, botanists and horticulturalists to engage with the natural processes of the garden to investigate our sensory relationship with nature.

In the greenhouse workshops, we looked at how we perceive place, using a series of original drawings as sites through which to create new drawings and new places - exploring translation, interpretation and the imagination.




Drawing Laboratory

The salon was part of the Drawing Laboratory: A series of experimental workshops exploring how we navigate, percieve and translate the world around us through drawing.

Through a series of evening salons, day and weekend workshops, we invited school children and youth groups, art and architecture students, artists, makers, growers and other creatives to participate in a giant collaborative map of the imagination. The map was drawn, redrawn and re-re-drawn over the course of the festival, by the eyes, hands and imaginations of many.

With a multi-disciplinary approach to speculative drawing and map-making practices at all different scales, the Drawing Laboratory uncovered, interpreted and reimagined the hidden secrets and stories around us; exploring how we experience place, both individually and as a collective. Experimenting with different drawing processes, found and made materials and engaging all our senses, each workshop traced, translated and re-imagined a new layer each responding to the ideas and drawings of the last. Through an additive and open-ended process, together we built, grew and populated the cities, gardens and mindscapes of our collective imagination. Together, we drew Cosmocartos.

The Drawing Laboratory collaborative map was exhibited in the greenhouses as it emerged over the course of the festival. Its official inauguration was on our last day - Friday 30 July, where we invited all participants to celebrate their part in it’s making.