Woods Residency: Kat Hill

April–May 2025

Kat Hill’s research and creative work focused on the interrelated stories of human and non-human actors in the landscape, and on more-than-human kinships. Rooted in her work on communities, landscapes, environmental futures and local histories, she drew on Tim Ingold’s notion of the taskscape to examine the pattern of dwelling activities intertwined around the beings in a place. In response to the landscape of the Woods and the surrounding area, she created a series of outputs which explored the temporalities, lives and entanglements of specific beings in this place, from the rocks to the flowers, the birds to the stars.

Throughout her time at the residency, she kept a daily journal, drawing on traditional forms of record-keeping such as commonplace books and almanacs, noting the time of the rising and setting sun, the changing phases of the moon, the birds she encountered, the weather that fronts that passed across the sky, the presence of people in a place. Daily walks and observations were paired with work in archives, discussions with local communities and heritage institutions, and research into the landscape. Whether consulting nineteenth-century planting and growing maps or exploring the history of local shrines, she mapped out the cartographies of time, space and meaning braided around a place.

The result was a series of creative forms that captured observations and reflections on the changing patterns of growth, light, texture and movement, and her shifting and evolving experience of the landscape: the daily journal, sketches and drawings, poems, archival research reports, and a piece of long-form creative non-fiction. She asked how and why it matters to engage in ways of living that are attuned to the rhythms of living worlds, of seasons, of day and night; how attention and observation can stimulate conversations about responsibility; and how we might explore practices of care and attentiveness when we live in an era of precarity and threatened futures. 

Kat Hill is an author & researcher based in the Highlands of Scotland. Her work focuses on questions of landscape, people, and heritage in various contexts from the bothies of the Scottish Highlands to non-conformist religious communities such as Mennonites in Europe, America and the Global South. She is the author of books Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585 (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter (William Collins, 2024). She currently works as a freelance writer and is a fellow at the IAS in Princeton. She is a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt and a European champion.
https://www.kathill.co.uk

​​Mutual Offerings: observing, mapping and collaborating with the landscape

Gathering and workshop with Kat Hill, permaculture designer Adéla Hrubá and clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Martin Halíř 
Sunday 4th May 2025, 10 – 16.00, Meadow and forest land between the villages Písečná and Hnátnice, Orlické Mountains

A permaculture walk foraging edible and medicinal plants and talking about the different traditions, names and cultural memories associated with them - both Czech and British. The participants had a chance to learn the basics of the permaculture method of designing plots and gardens, understanding what plants, features and structures belong in their garden and where to place them so that they could thrive and benefit us and the Earth. We explored the landscape and living world around the Woods land. We observed the place and reflected on the plants that grow there and the beings that live there. 

The afternoon followed by a hands-on workshop on making liquid fertiliser and burning biochar to take home, along with wild tomato seedlings. We focused on ways of understanding and working with the land and world around us. We began with a joint mapping exercise that drew attention to ways in which different people see, remember and encounter the landscape. We thought about practical ways in which we could work sustainably with the land and non-human others.

On solitude and encounter: observing places with curiosity and care

Wednesday 7th May 11 am, Technology Center Mikulandská

A talk in which Kat Hill explored her creative practice focused on small spaces and specific localities as a way of examining the entangled human and non-human relationships in a place, and stimulating conversations around care and responsibility, to others and to living worlds. At a time of environmental and climate crisis, Kat Hill is interested in how the acts of curiosity and creativity can offer a way of understanding and reframing our relationships to places.

From mountain huts to repeated walks along particular paths, Kat Hill examines these as places where we may often be alone, consumed by our own thoughts or retreating from modernity, if just for a moment. But also, as places where we encounter beyond-human worlds and other people on our journeys, if only for fleeting moments. Drawing on her residency at the Woods and her wider creative non-fiction work, the talk explored how we as practitioners might read landscapes and localities through experience, research and observation; how we record and respond to the shifting temporalities of a place, its rhythms of dwelling, sensory worlds and its many actors; and how that conversation about curiosity and observation may make us sensitive to the entangled practices of care and damage that are threaded through our relationship with landscapes in the current climate. 

Photos by Nicholas J. R. White and Markéta Sasi Choma