Origins, Continued...Designing Islands

Landscape Architecture On My Own Terms

I ended my last post with my oil painting phase. Besides competing with design practice, it was starting to feel like a bit of a dead end for these island explorations.

First there was the issue I mentioned before. Taking advantage of the medium to intensify the individual scenes—giving some of them a surreal, dreamlike quality compared to the original photography—distracted from the spatial theme of capturing islands and contrasts. It was those contrasts that I really wanted to intensify. But also this whole slicing-and-juxtaposing approach, in both photomontage and oils (I’ll just call it “montage”), wasn’t actually doing enough to compensate for what landscape architecture wasn’t giving me.

Choosing that field had been the right choice. I liked the challenge of manipulating sites in ways that were constructable at least in theory—working with actual scales and dimensions—even if they did end up staying on paper. It involved a level of problem-solving that creating abstract representations didn’t. Being an artist wasn’t going to be enough. The issue was that I wasn’t designing much or at all in the kind of site—ecologically intact and diverse, usually remote and obscure—that I was the most passionate about. That didn’t mean I wasn’t finding any fulfillment in landscape architecture at all, but there was a nagging void.

So I needed to try taking landscape architecture itself in my own direction, not just filling in the gaps with other pursuits. Yes, I could’ve also looked for a different office with projects more in line with my interests—they do exist—but at the same time I’d also become disenchanted with a lot of the day-to-day workings of the profession. This combination of factors led me to begin what I thought would be a one- or two-year break from practice, enough to just get all of this out of my system.

It has of course ended up extending far beyond that. But this next phase, a more straightforward extension of my design career than earlier or later ones, did last about two years. It focused on designing islands—of the four different kinds that I’ve later come to categorize—and in many cases also designing paths and structures on (or in) those islands. So I left the montaging behind and stuck to different combinations of traditional plans, section/elevations, perspectives, and physical models. The 2D views were mostly 15”x20” and in watercolor on paper, which I found better than oils for representing natural patterns and textures. I overlaid most of the plan views with representations of topography in other media (the physical models).

Two of these designs were Saucer Island and Shark Fin Island, each represented in a series of views at multiple scales as in a typical design project. I imagined both of these oceanic islands as compressing a crazy (i.e. impossible?) amount of ecological/climatic diversity into a tiny area, nesting together two of my island types: islands created or defined by conditions “from above” (e.g. precipitation) and “from below” (e.g. the ocean).

Saucer Island is a wide volcanic cone and crater as the name implies, so it actually checks off a third island type as well. I designed an eco-lodge near the coast of the dry western side and a series of pavilions and boardwalks on the wet, boggy rim of the eastern side, tied together by an island-wide trail system. Here’s an animation showing how the views successively zoom in on those two focal elements. (If you’re reading the email version of this and it doesn’t play, you can watch it here.) All the paintings are 15”x20,” and the overlays are marker on acetate.

I created Shark Fin Island, the name again descriptive of the form, for a design-your-own-island competition in LA+ (an interdisciplinary landscape architecture journal). This one, hypothetically located in the North Atlantic, is half-wet and half-dry too; the maximum area allowed was one square kilometer, so a dramatic slope was essential to making that contrast remotely believable. In this case there aren’t any structures to complement each of those natural conditions—I imagined the island as basically untouched. But the perspective views give a sense of this dual ecological character.

Original watercolor plan 22”x22,” section 11”x22,” presented with digital overlays.

The island’s two ecological zones, with their associated (and invented!) flora. The island’s meant to be a biogeographical microcosm both on the ecosystem and species level. Original watercolors 14”x22” each.

Most of the other islands are each represented only by a single work, and I stuck to plan view for the painting components. With watercolor being a new medium for me I think I still wasn’t comfortable inventing and then competently rendering views from other vantage points. If I included any 3D information at all, I captured it in the model/overlay components. Informally I call this my “Isolations” series. The majority of these designs are the product of artist residencies in Iceland and on Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania, inspired by landscapes there with varying degrees of imagination and idealization.

First, Iceland:

Fissure (15x20”)—a chain of craters and boardwalks loosely inspired by Laki Crater Row. In all these stand-alone works I scratched up the paper in spots (just using my fingernails) to add more geological texture.

Windows (15”x20”x1.5”)—more volcanoes, these with hot springs in the craters, inspired by no one spot in particular. The topography’s modeled in stacked layers of laser-cut plexiglass, with the “slicing away” creating some formal continuity with the earlier montage style.

Village Volcano (15”x20”). This “urban volcano” and the one below were inspired by dreams I had before and during my residency. They’re the first of any of my island-themed works to feature an urban component, rounding out my four island categories (and making the strongest connection back to landscape architecture in terms of subject matter). I’ve drawn the contour lines in oil paint pen on a single layer of plexiglass.

Community Crater Cluster (15”x20”). There’s a connection back to the montages here too with the park-city edge, more meaningfully than with the 3D topo in Windows.

Then, Australia:

Bat Island (15”x20”x1”). More “sliced up” topography—stacked layers of plexiglass in the center, and contours and waterways etched into a single layer on the left. And this imaginary island itself is “sliced off” from two real-life, overlapping islands: Flinders Island and the evocative and endangered landscape of Strzelecki National Park. This piece of the park was the most physically and visually accessible, and I wanted to intensify that feeling of “knowability.” I’ve depicted the landscape realistically other than the artificial coastline along the top of the island.

Flying Fox Island (15”x20”). I’ve actually taken the outline of this one from a little islet off the coast of Flinders. In reality it’s flat, featureless, and semiarid, but I’ve blown it up and added topography to give it a wet summit zone.

And, loose inspiration from some other places:

The Valley Isle (18”x18”). The title is the nickname for Maui, but the design is actually my idealized vision of Nihoa, one of the Leeward Hawaiian Islands (off-limits to tourism). Both the real and idealized Nihoa are desert-like but cut by a few lush valleys—long and skinny “islands-within-the island”—filled with endemic fan palms. I’ve etched the section cut line into a second layer of plexiglass over the contour lines.

Seabiscuit Island (15”x20”). This one essentially combines the concepts of the two Australia-inspired works above—I’ve taken Death Valley’s Split Cinder Cone, surrounded it by water, and given it just enough size and elevation to support two boggy highland zones. (This happens to be the same inspiration, and imagination, behind my oil painting High Desert.)

The downsizing from the scale of the oil paintings was initially for practical reasons related to the media choice and to the goal at the beginning (with Saucer Island) of making sets of multiple paintings. Also I’d realized that the large, immersive scale of the oil paintings (in addition to the surrealist quality) was actually antithetical to the whole “compression” concept that drives me to capture and intensify these islands and contrasts in the first place. I want to convey a sense of psychologically grasping these places, of absorbing them in their entirety—not being absorbed by them.

But this idea of smallness (and related to that, rarity) in the geographical sense had started to take on another, less idiosyncratic kind of significance for me too—a quality of fragility. Most islands are, by definition, precarious in some way. The species and ecosystems within them, or the often finely-tuned environmental conditions that sustain (and isolate) those elements to begin with, are especially and increasingly vulnerable to human impacts.

Obviously, nature has been in constant flux long before the present day. That’s because of natural processes themselves along with human activity playing a significant role too over millennia. The urge to freeze in time and space the relatively intact islands that we still have, whether they exist as islands because of natural conditions or because of us, is really another form of “grasping.”

I’ll have a lot more to say about this tension between stability and change, including what it means for the whole idea of ecological fragility in the first place, later on. For now though, I’m going to take that idea at face value. Conveying this sense of fragility would be an important motivator for my work going forward, and further reason for going with the smaller scales at this stage in the evolution.

Despite the shift in dimensions (and medium) though, the plan-view watercolors would essentially end up merging with the earlier perspective-based montages, eventually kicking off the mosaic watercolor maps that I’m making now. I can trace that back to one particular work that I’ll describe in an upcoming post. It’s another one that came out of the residency on Flinders Island, inspired by that extraordinary national park which I’ll be gushing effusively about….

-Darren