Gabriella Rhodes, UK
www.gabriellarhodes.com
Instagram: @_rhodesgabriella
Embodied Sediments explores how design and ecology can collaborate to strengthen biodiversity restoration by expanding how landscapes are sensed, measured, and understood. The project centres on the idea that restoration is not solely a scientific task but is also cultural, relational, sensory, and material aligning with pluriversal perspectives that recognise multiple ways of world-making (Escobar 2018). By integrating disciplines, it investigates how fieldwork can become a plural, situated practice that reveals the entanglements between abiotic, biotic, social, and atmospheric conditions (Tsing 2015).
The project takes sediments as a starting point. Biodiversity assessments often prioritise visible biotic indicators such as plants, insects, and birds, while geological and abiotic systems remain in the background. Yet sediments and soils store deep-time narratives, nutrient flows, hydrological rhythms, and structural conditions that underpin biodiversity: echoing more-than-human approaches to care that ask us to attend to overlooked material agencies (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Yusoff 2018). Recognising sediments as active participants positions them as collaborators in understanding and restoring ecosystems.
Embodied Sediments combines ecological and geological methodologies (soil cores, soil texture and moisture observations, quadrat-based species mapping, and habitat surveys) with artistic and embodied practices: deep listening, sonic recordings, grounding exercises, and material explorations with site-specific sediments and clays. Together, these approaches show how scientific measurements and embodied encounters can complement one another, each revealing aspects of living systems that the other may not capture (Ingold 2011). Working with sediments materially (forming spheres, creating pigments, testing texture) acts as a form of “thinking-with”. Tactile explorations reveal sediments as carriers of ecological memory, cultural narratives, and restoration potential. They offer intimate, sensory ways of engaging with sub-surface systems that complement scientific analysis and echo practices of relational, multi-species attention (WalkingLab; Tsing 2015)
An ongoing component of the project is experimenting with relational forms of data visualisation. While scientific diagrams are designed for clarity, comparability, and methodological precision, they often serve different purposes than design-led approaches. Embodied Sediments works alongside these established tools by exploring cartographies and block-diagram mappings that complement scientific representations with additional layers of sensory, material, and cultural context.
This approach draws from cosmopolitical and plural mapping traditions that highlight the need for situated, multi-sensorial, and multi-perspective geographies (Stengers 2011; Aït-Touati, Arènes & Latour 2019). These relational maps foreground connections between abiotic and biotic processes, human stories and land-use histories, and sensory atmospheres and ecological change, offering expanded ways of understanding place that sit in dialogue with existing ecological methods.
Community knowledge and co-stewardship are central. Rather than positioning communities as ‘invited in,’ the project recognizes the lived expertise already held by those in close relationship with the land, farmers, fishers, land workers, craftspeople, and residents, and works alongside these place-based knowledge systems. Open-source approaches such as shared field notes, citizen-led observations, and material exchanges support the circulation of ecological understanding across scientific, artistic, and lived practices. This aligns with research demonstrating the value of art–science collaboration and cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange in ecological work (Graham et al. 2020).
Embodied Sediments proposes that biodiversity restoration is more effective when scientific methodologies are combined with artistic, embodied, and community-based practices. This approach allows multiple ways of knowing to coexist, revealing richer understandings of place and supporting inclusive environmental stewardship. By listening to sediments and the unseen agencies of landscapes, the project opens new pathways for ecological care, restoration, and co-flourishing.