Projects

Seeding Grounds: Working Beyond Arcadia in The Pyrocene

A trio of digital images showing people working on grassy open landscapes including by erecting a fencepost.

Process triptych: A coalition of rangers and farmers remove extant fencing across the site, keeping only the posts that lay along the burn line. These posts become the markers for the formation of the fireline remembrance trail, whereby hikers, rangers, farmers and visitors can fill the seed cans with seed as small gestures toward land reconciliation.

by Stewart Crane Sarris (MLA I ’24)

From drought, to fire, Australia’s landscapes face multiple existential threats. A response to the tectonic loss of life in the 2019 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires, Seeding Grounds: Working Beyond Arcadia in the Pyrocene, seeks to reckon with Australia’s perception of country that has engendered its ongoing dance with ecological annihilation. Proposing the establishment of the Fireline National Park along Kangaroo Island’s 2019 ‘Black Summer’ burn scar, the work inverts the methods and means by which land ‘management’ has engendered the disconnect between country and process. Utilising the traditional interventions of the National Park, fence post, rain water water tank, and seed bank, the thesis inverts colonial land management infrastructures in an attempt to cultivate acts of disturbance as a means of growing ecologies forward into uncertain climatic futures. In so doing, Seeding Grounds resists the impulse of a static preservationism, rejecting the preeminent consumption | conservation paradigm in favour of acknowledging that our landscapes are embedded in processes of decay and renewal. Here, the anachronistic mythology of a static ‘Arcadia’ yields to an understanding of country as archival palimpsest, one that envisions a semantic shift from disturbance as destruction to phenomena as process. In this way, Seeding Grounds, brings awareness to Australia’s threatened landscapes, positing that phenomenological processes can perform as a form of generative catharsis through which socio-cultural relationships toward the natural world can be novelly (re)built.

A map of Australia showing national parks and preservation areas.
Context Plan 1: Australia has over 600 National Parks, more than any country in the world. Home to the second National Park in the world, and the first specifically founded to protect a vulnerable ecosystem, Australia’s National Reserve System (NRS) network covers approximately 20 percent of the continent’s total landmass. Kangaroo Island, the site of the thesis is indicated by the black box.
An aerial view of an island covered partially with smoke. Significant locations are marked on the image.
Aerial Perspective: View of the 2019-2020 ‘Black-Summer’ Bushfires on Kangaroo Island. During the 2019–2020 Black Summer Bushfires, approximately half of the island burned, of which the majority was protected National Parks and Wilderness Areas.
A map of a proposed national park on which are marked various different landscape types and growing conditions.
Central Plan: The proposed site of Fireline National Park (outlined with grey, shown in green). The park is made up of a series of prototypical interventions that change and move over time, allowing the boundaries of the park to grow and expand in response to user input and surrounding land use.
A series of images including drawings, diagrams, photographs, and collages that show different uses of and potential designs for fence posts.
Left and middle: Details of the fence posts as converted into wind-dispersing seed posts. Top right: View of posts acting as way-finders for hikers. Middle-right: Historical image of the construction of the dingo proof fence, courtesy of the BBC. Bottom: Progression section of the plant communities growing over the posts through time.
A series of four drawings showing the changing impact of a water tank over time.
Composite Section: Section detailing the impacts of the water tank’s ram pumps over time. Their use will result in the formation of ephemeral wetlands and riparian communities as they pump water from dams and reservoirs to the water tanks and finally back out over the land.
A plan of a landscape showing a proposed campsite.
Detail Plan: Plan of a potential campsite along the fireline remembrance trail. The water tank doubles as a chimney for campfires and as a means of liberating water from dams and pre-existing agricultural reservoirs.
A section drawing of a landscape showing different trees as well as a water tank with smoke or steam coming out of it.
Detail Section: Section of smoke-infusing rain water tank at the proposed campsite. The infusion of smoke into the central drum allows smoke-germinated species to be propagated, illustrating human presence or absence at each site.
Diagrams showing different uses of seed banks and different topological conditions on a landscape.
Top Detail: axons of how vegetation structure in planted seed banks can be used as an agent to help care for – and cultivate – fire. Bottom: Typologies of seed bank used depending upon topographical conditions and vehicular accessibility.
A digital image showing people standing in a grassy landscape with what appears to be smoke and fire on it.
View: Firesticks members start a fire at the site of an old seed bank after seven years, thereby allowing for regeneration to occur.