Lesley Roberts, US
https://materialencounters.art/
"Art's purpose is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers." - James Baldwin
"We need artists where we don't expect to find them." - Unknown
Becoming Place is a creative response, a method of exploring the generative potentialities threading practice, place, and knowledge creation. Inspired by the socio-cultural theory of way-finding, Becoming Place suggests paths of revelation and sense-making that touch a deep and urgent query: How does one go about finding that thing the nature of which is wholly unknown to you? (Solnit)
Becoming Place is an embodied and co-creative research method that embraces ambiguity and invites us to recognise the terrain and our presence within it as the method for discovering what we seek. The approach is fluid, a path not a prescription, a shape-shifting tool and harbinger of affordances in the way that Odysseus' oar becomes a threshing rod as it traverses time, place, and mind.
Becoming Place suggests mental, physical, imaginative, and speculative possibilities of being in and of, and navigating through, place. It encourages transdisciplinary systems thinking, and intuits (as do many Indigenous cultures and pre-Enlightenment Western cosmology) that mind is out here, a knowingness we enter as we move through place.
Becoming Place invites us to refuse the givens and pose new questions of what is and could be. It seeks the liminal and the What if?, wonders how ancestral knowledge could resurface as living practice, and is curious how meaning and function are mediated by time. It extends the idea of what design and scientific research can be and asks us to explore not experiment. (Popova)
Through deep mapping as rediscovery, walking as ritual, photography as contemplation, video as wonderment, narrative as stillness, foraging as discernment, and making as revelation, Becoming Place experiments with shapeshifting, extending and erasing traditional boundaries between science and art-design and offering a method rich with transformative potential. Beginning with a fluid mind and asking different questions, the designer-ecologist collaboration offers us ways to enter relation and identify points of engagement with environmental projects.
Let's frame place as embodied, muscled hope. Let's read the ground for mythology, folklore, fable, and fairy tale, deciphering the scent tracks of lost history and meaning, as the stories that tell us what we need to learn about the world. The artist-designer creates new stories of place, object, and practice through metaphor, poetry, and language play – all pathways to other ways of knowing. With story we bring folklore to science, design to ecology, and poetry to exploration.
This poetic translation of way-finding isn’t about signs in a literal sense—it’s about how we understand place to navigate from one idea to another. Idea, once synonymous with species. (Abram, p118) "If Science is about determining and naming and proving, art [design] is about inventing the future with fragments from the past (Ulrich Obrist) Language tells us that design-art-craft is relevant and necessary. Our minds were woven in craft, hence spinning a tale and weaving a story.
And poetics is how the world expresses itself, through rhythms and fractals and birds in flight. As designers we are trained to offer different outcomes in both form and function, in content as well as means. As humans, we've mediated so much of our lived experiences through various technological appendages we no longer believe in ourselves as sensing bodies, as sources of knowing and knowledge or as means of creating meaning. Yet we are bodies for knowing place.
Becoming Place imagines a portal to ontological reimaginings, actively generating a cascade of related, visceral effects that support biodiversity restoration and regeneration of place. It is an active poetics and practice of flourishing that fosters resiliency and revitalises our enchantment with the world.
References
Abram, D. (2010). Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Vintage Books. New York.
Icarus films: Donna Haraway. (n.d.). Retrieved November 15, 2025, from https://icarusfilms.com/if-donna
Lippard, L. R. (2014), Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. The New Press. New York.
Obrist, H. U., & Durbin, A. (2025, October 27). ‘A Portal to Possibilities’: Hans Ulrich Obrist on His New Memoir. Frieze. https://www.frieze.com/article/hans-ulrich-obrist-life-in-progress-2025
Popova, M. (2025, October 13). How to be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself. The Marginalian. https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/10/13/pessoa-explorer/
Solnit, R. (2006). A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Penguin Publishing Group.