How invisible systems shape the landscape around us

For about a decade I lived in a house that looked across Otago Harbour in Ōtepoti. The view from my window took in the Ravensdown fertiliser factory across the water where, every so often, a container ship would dock and unload for three or four days before slipping away again. I became interested in the way these ships would glide in, and leave again so silently. What did they carry, where did they come from?

Tracing these ships led me back to a phosphate mine in Western Sahara, a territory under Moroccan occupation, where a vote on self-determination promised to the Indigenous Sahrawi people since 1991 has never happened. That factory across the harbour sat at the end of a very long chain – one connecting my own location to a disputed territory on the other side of the world.

Tracing such systems formed the starting point for my doctoral research, which asks a simple but slightly unsettling question: what does it mean to live inside a designed landscape? There are moments of design everywhere in our daily experience – buildings, roads, phones – but my research looks to visualise and interrogate the less obvious systems of design that shape reality.

The research draws on a broad idea from design theory: that design is an act of "prefiguration" – a thought practice for imagining something before it exists in the world. Once you accept that definition, almost nothing is exempt. A factory is designed. So is a supply chain, a piece of legislation, a slogan, a border. And because we live inside these systems, the relationship runs both ways: we design the world, and in turn, it designs us by shaping what feels possible.

Alongside the phosphate ships, I built a second case study around the Clyde Dam in Central Otago, a legacy of Robert Muldoon's "Think Big" programme – a wave of massive infrastructure projects launched in the 1970s and 80s after the oil shocks, meant to make the country more energy self-sufficient. 

Standing on the dam's viewing platform, it's hard not to feel a kind of awe. But that awe sits alongside the knowledge that a township was flooded to build it; the Mata-au Clutha River turned into a lake. And knowing that the dam exists because of political decisions and narratives about national identity, self-sufficiency and the necessities of modern life; in a similar way to the phosphate ships, it functions outside most people’s line of sight, yet it helps to usher certain possibilities into being.

What connects a fertiliser factory and a hydro dam is the idea of infrastructure as a stack – never just one decision or object, but layer upon layer of design stacked over time: engineering, policy, narrative and politics. As much as a dam exists as a physical intervention into the landscape, it's also the political will that built it, the story sold to justify it; it’s also a container for different attitudes and perspectives; ones that can change over time. Pull on any one thread in that stack and the whole tangle starts to become visible.

Because my doctorate had a practice-based element, both of these case studies were turned into exhibitions. The phosphate research became a film called Empty Vessels, a collaboration with Western Saharan artist Mohamed Sleiman Labat, projected onto the Piccadilly Lights in London. The Clyde Dam research became The Power That Flows Through Us, a installation featuring film, sculpture and publication elements, exhibited at public sites around Cromwell and Clyde. In each case, the exhibition becomes a venue for visualising hidden or peripheral systems.

Beyond making the systems of design more visible, by framing design as a thought process made manifest, my research asks us to think about what kind of thoughts dominate the designed landscape around us. Interrogating this landscape through my art practice is about challenging dominant thought practices, wading into the complexity of our designed landscapes, and ultimately asking, what alternative landscapes and ways of being might exist.