PATCHWORK BRITAIN
ENVIRONMENT | 2019
A textile installation examining Britain's loss of biodiversity through landscape as archive.
Introduction
The UK's countryside looks idyllic until you see it from above. From a satellite, it reads as a sterile patchwork of intensive agriculture, ranked among the world's most biodiversity-depleted landscapes despite the pastoral image it projects. Patchwork Britain began as a question: what would it mean to make that loss visible — and to do it through a tradition as rooted in British culture as quilting itself? It is a project about environmental data made tactile, about grief made holdable, about the gap between how we imagine a landscape and what it has actually become.
The UK's countryside looks idyllic until you see it from above. From a satellite, it reads as a sterile patchwork of intensive agriculture, ranked among the world's most biodiversity-depleted landscapes despite the pastoral image it projects. Patchwork Britain began as a question: what would it mean to make that loss visible — and to do it through a tradition as rooted in British culture as quilting itself? It is a project about environmental data made tactile, about grief made holdable, about the gap between how we imagine a landscape and what it has actually become.
Services
Editorial Design
Installation
Editorial Design
Installation
The Challenge
The challenge was translating ecological data — satellite imagery, field maps, biodiversity surveys — into something that could be felt rather than just understood. Statistics about species loss don't move people. Numbers about habitat destruction don't either, not really, not in the way that changes behaviour or shifts attention. A large-scale textile that you have to physically unfold to find the biodiverse landscape hidden inside it might. The work needed to modernise an archaic tradition without flattening it, to sit within the history of British textile craft while making an argument that tradition alone cannot make, and to document catastrophe without becoming a dirge.
The Solution
Screen-grabbed satellite maps of fields across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland became the visual raw material, translated into large-scale textile work using the structural language of the British quilt. The glyph font Colour Dot records the landscapes depicted in each image but requires decoding — creating an interaction between viewer and work that mirrors our broader disconnection from the land we think we know.
Biodiverse landscapes are hidden inside the folds, requiring discovery. The act of unfolding becomes the argument: the richness was always there. It just needed someone to look. Environmental illustration and textile design working together as a single system, each asking something of the person who encounters it. What would it mean to let Britain become wild again?
The challenge was translating ecological data — satellite imagery, field maps, biodiversity surveys — into something that could be felt rather than just understood. Statistics about species loss don't move people. Numbers about habitat destruction don't either, not really, not in the way that changes behaviour or shifts attention. A large-scale textile that you have to physically unfold to find the biodiverse landscape hidden inside it might. The work needed to modernise an archaic tradition without flattening it, to sit within the history of British textile craft while making an argument that tradition alone cannot make, and to document catastrophe without becoming a dirge.
The Solution
Screen-grabbed satellite maps of fields across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland became the visual raw material, translated into large-scale textile work using the structural language of the British quilt. The glyph font Colour Dot records the landscapes depicted in each image but requires decoding — creating an interaction between viewer and work that mirrors our broader disconnection from the land we think we know.
Biodiverse landscapes are hidden inside the folds, requiring discovery. The act of unfolding becomes the argument: the richness was always there. It just needed someone to look. Environmental illustration and textile design working together as a single system, each asking something of the person who encounters it. What would it mean to let Britain become wild again?
