Master of Landscape Architecture Student, Chloe Walsh has been named joint winner of the 2022 Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize.
Chloe’s graduating project Grassland Tales: braiding care, culture and maintenance imagines the evolution of Camperdown Memorial Rest Park in Sydney’s inner west as an interconnected grassland that harbours native species of ephemeral, native and spontaneous grasses which are managed and tended to in adaptive ways.
The project uses a grassroots approach which involves building knowledge and energy within the community through art installations and advocacy. The activities included the temporary installation of a fabric drawing, the display of cards that told the tales of individual grassland species, the distribution of leaflets (to take home) within the park and the creation of an audio-guide for a meditative walk through the cemetery. Each encounter or tale offered alternative ways of sensing grasslands and the lively beings (plants, insects, birds, reptiles, and mycorrhizal fungi) that inhabit them.
The activities encouraged an embodied care for these plant communities, which – when layered with scientific knowledge and the cultural relationships that shape how we treat them – helped to build a rich and complex understanding of the site and its inhabitants. The project imagines a world where design and maintenance (care) are one and the same act, with a reciprocity that extends between people and landscape.
Observation and tending to the remnant grasslands that inhabit the cemetery adjacent to the park with a local “Friends of” group were integral to the project’s design methodology.
The jury commended Chloe’s project for its emphasis on the value of slowness, care, and attention to detail in design practice:
The work is a quiet, yet powerful comment on the nature and direction of the landscape architecture profession. Meticulous, poetic drawings and a carefully curated selection of photographs focus on landscape processes at the micro-scale and foreground how seemingly small moves and acts can have very large import. This highly emotive project reorients how we might work as designers, and demonstrates how taking the time to observe, sense and engage with people and landscape can encourage much deeper and richer understandings of site.
The Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize identifies and shares the finest graduating projects produced in Australian landscape architecture education.