Chloe Burdekin

Unclearing Ullapool explores a possible sustainable future for a highland landscape. Temporally framed by the Highland Clearances and ongoing efforts to re-wild northern Scotland, it proposes to cultivate ‘wildness’ we must understand cultivation as an act of care and labour. In response, re-wilding entails a fundamental rethinking of our inhabitation of landscape, involving new patterns and practices of care and construction.

A site near Loch Achall is ‘uncleared’ to form a community organised around the growth of trees for lumber, and for re-foresting projects elsewhere in the highlands. Within this new community, Unclearing Ullapool re-sets common relationships. Tomatoes and peppercorns – both non-native but common to many local dining tables – become strange objects around which new social relations might be established. Through detailed drawings and film, they are estranged, and a language of casts, skins and suspensions emerge to inform a re-drawing of highland ruins, and an architecture set into but separate from landscape. This architecture is asynchronous with its supporting landscape.  The landscape is not forced out of season to accommodate architecture; architecture is ‘forced’ to accommodate landscape. Spaces for storage and gathering allow for fluctuations in crops and consumers. Buildings fit the landscape, but not quite. Through the gateway building, spaces gather in a central courtyard before they branch out further into the landscape, becoming less imposing as they do so. Drying rooms and curing sheds respond to the landscape and community by stretching material timescales. The renewed strangeness of the tomato and the peppercorn re-emerge in the oddity of a netball court in the woods, or a pop-up market in a yoga studio.