Deep Mapping: a tool to navigate uncertainty and forge connections.

Written By Luciana Hermida

Pilgrimage to Hilbre through the fog (2024) [digital photograph] Photo: Luciana Hermida.

Our connection with nature is in urgent need of attention. Climate change is increasingly affecting nature and people’s lives. According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), climate change has vastly contributed to loss and degradation of ecosystems, reduced water and food security, increased mortality and human migration and displacement, damaged livelihoods, increased mental health issues and increased inequality. Our world is warming and extreme events are increasingly impacting nature and people's lives everywhere. A revised connection with nature is needed if we wish to stir away from devastating consequences to our environment. We require urgent far-reaching actions and fundamental changes in all aspects of human life to increase people’s and nature’s ability to cope with, and respond to, climate change. From this perspective, what is also required alongside consistent and deliverable top-down decisions from governments, is a careful re-addressing of this connection from all humans, regardless of who they are; we increasingly need to work in what the geographers Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift call “the curious space between wonder and thought” – a space where, they insist: “there is no single disciplinary (in an academic sense) voice”. A more meaningful and shared connection with the environment is needed to re-evaluate how we navigate the current landscape of environmental degradation. 

 

Navigating climate change through deep mapping 

In the context of climate change, creative practices help to reshape uncertainty and help unfold different ways of dealing and coping with an uncertain landscape. The unknown can be also considered an opportunity, a space for wonder. This space can help to construct new bridges between what we know and what we don’t know. In a dying planet, a space for wonder is also a space for life to spring forth or emerge. It is the refusal to allow our thinking to be a form of what the philosopher Martin Heidegger calls “enframement” and, instead an opting for poiesis, a space for creativity to unfold so new knowledge can be created. For this space to be relevant, inclusive, interdisciplinary practices that embrace non-linearity and open thinking are paramount, such as deep mapping.

Lee, G et al. (2010), The Stony Rises Project, RMIT Gallery, [installation], Melbourne (Australia). Available at: https://netsvictoria.org.au/exhibition/the-stony-rises-project/ [Links to an external site. Accessed 25th April 2025].

The Stony Rises work is simultaneously a mat and a map of various places and regions open to various interpretations through the invitation to walk the mat and to look closely at what is noticed; the audience is implicated in the work and is invited to add, reorganise an adjust as necessary. This is mobile ground where shifting spaces – of the gallery of the locale and the serendipitous offering of new places and elements allows for expansion and contraction of mat space, and the subsequent re-curation of material.

Deep mapping as a method, serves to navigate a particular landscape offering the possibility to engage with the environment in a way that meaningfully addresses connection. The purpose of doing this is to enhance people's connection with a particular place, inviting to create a conversation with others, a joint mapping of experiences, and not just the reading of a list of facts and landmarks about a place. Deep mapping also involves the possibility to involve creativity, freedom of thought and expression. These aspects are often underestimated in scientific circles as useful tools to help navigate climate change. 

 

Destabilising habitual patterns 

Deep maps are not related to the physical depth of an area, they don't correspond with a traditional understanding of a map, subject to accuracy. Deep maps on the contrary, seek to destabilise habitual patterns, to explore without direction, to uncover that which is often overlooked (here is where the space of wonder mentioned above, seeks its place in this process). These type of maps serve the purpose of exploring, analysing and visualising what is and what could be. They are usually applied to a specific geographical area, but they are not about the area itself in a superficial sense; they are about the land and the landscape with all its shared stories and experiences. The human aspect is imprinted within rather than on it, or about it. Deep maps are a type of cartography that addresses connection and experience. 

Heat-Moon (1991), PrairyErth, Mariner Books, USA. Available at: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/PrairyErth/UNkPAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 [Links to an external site. Accessed 20th April 2025]

The author’s range of references from history, geography, botany, folklore, and letters contributes largely to this book about Chase Country (Kansas). Heat-Moon is a travel writer, not a scholar or critic. His concern is more than finding facts as backdrop for anecdotes; it engages with the landscape in a self-reflexive manner. The book is arranged geographically rather than chronologically, with the individual stories told in each chapter standing in no particular order. They stand as "a kind of collage’’, an object made of other, randomly arranged objects, a complex composite image revealing past, present, and future in one piece.

Biggs, I (2018), Notitia 6: Suburban Edge,
[mixed media], Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery (Leeds). Available at: http://www.iainbiggs.co.uk/2023/04/arcadia-for-all-rethinking-landscape-painting-now/ [Links to an external site. Accessed: 20th April, 2025]

This artwork by researcher and artist and Iain Biggs combines multiple ways of visually representing place, an approach to deep mapping that Biggs has described as polyvocal. Using a range of materials to explore ideas of landscape, environment and representation. This work is based on the activity of walking as the groundwork for these artworks.

Kavanagh, E (2015-2018), Layers in the Landscape, [interdisciplinary project], Cardigan Bay, Wales (UK). Available at: https://www.library.wales/news/article/layers-in-the-landscape. [Links to an external site. Accessed 19th April 2025].

Layers in the Landacape is a multi media project which applied the concept of interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical 'deep mapping' to the submerged landscape of Cardigan Bay, especially the submerged forest at Borth. This deep mapping project encompassed drawing, painting, graphic design, photography, performance and a film.

As an Art in Science Master's student at Liverpool School of Art & Design, my research, 'Re-Imagining Ecosystems' includes a sub-project (Re-Imagining Hilbre) that involves the deep mapping Hilbre Island, a tidal island on the Wirral (North West England, UK). Through a public engagement event, Being Human Festival 2024 and recent workshops I have created a space for deep mapping, which involved walking to Hilbre, as a way of creating direction and purpose to enable the mapping of this site, before inviting people to engage with the landscape more deeply through creativity.

 

Contributions to the Deep Mapping of Hilbre Island 

The focus of the past workshops on Hilbre Island has been on the geomorphology. This theme served to connect with the deep layers of time of the island, and also to explore how people can connect with the land through creativity. The participants of the workshops have contributed to the deep mapping of Hilbre by not only engaging with the landscape, but thinking deeply about how they connected with the island. After gaining ethical approval from university to collect feedback from participants, I gathered valuable insights that have contributed to the deep mapping process:

“I have realised the power of artistic approaches to engage with nature conservation in deeper and more meaningful ways.”
— Participant of workshop (Being Human Festival) - 08.11.24
“I gained a heightened awareness of the islands as part of the whole ecology, with the life forms and natural features all interlinked and acting on each other.”
— Participant of workshop (Being Human Festival)- 08.11.24
“I found the activity very freeing, doing the imprints rather than trying to recreate something recognisable. It was lovely for the soul just to focus on rock and what came out from that. Connecting with something so ancient.”
— Participant of workshop (Re-Imagining Hilbre) - 06.04.25
“Finding a suitable location to do the rock rubbings really forced me to focus and look closely, and see how things relate to each other. Its nice to take the time to do this.”
— Participant of workshop (Re-Imagining Hilbre) - 06.04.25
“I enjoyed touching and feeling the rocks, feeling the weight of time, connecting with something big and small at the same time.”
— Participant of workshop (Re-Imagining Hilbre) - 06.04.25
 

Turning personal cartography into a shared cartography

In a world of climate loss, it has never been more important to acknowledge our connection to nature.

“The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. ”
— Sir Robert Watson, IPBES Chair (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services)

In 2019, the Leader of Wirral Council acknowledged that we are now in a state of climate emergency. The erosion of our very foundations, can be linked to the eroding landscape of Hilbre Island. Hilbre is a disappearing landmark also subject to the effects of climate change. Storm surges are causing erosion from the sea and wind on Hilbre's sandstone formations which is also contributing to the disappearance of the whole archipelago. This factor added to the polluting effects of siltation on the rocky shore ecosystems and the trampling by visitors is also damaging the vegetation and accelerating erosion. 

The reality of this eroding site has also proven to be an opportunity to think how to create new connections, new platforms to weave the initial threads of deep mapping. In this process, I turn my personal cartography into a shared cartography; one that happens when we exchange experiences of a particular landscape with others, discussing what we see and the impressions we gather from a particular place. A shared journey is a shared cartography, from the moment we decide to embark on the same walk or route. When shared cartographies are materialised through art, they can be powerful tools to observe experience and generate new exchanges and ways of connecting with what we see. 

Following the idea of a shared cartography, connections unfold and get stronger the more they are journeyed/transited and shared. Artist collectives such as Invisible Flock, have used similar methods through LandBody Ecologies. For the project Tapestry of Stories, they created a space for the lived experiences of different communities, a space to share stories of connection with the land, and their fast disappearing relationship with the environment around them, and in turn their own sense of identity. This way of acknowledging the landscape is not determined by those in power but empowered by shared experience.

Empowering the simple act of walking/navigating and observing together, brings hope about how can we re-learn to see and re-imagine connections with one another and with the land we stand on in a more meaningful way. In the book ‘Wild Service’ by Nick Hayes (writer, illustrator, and campaigner for land access) he states: we observe. And by observing, we come to understand relationships (…). We are ecological beings at root. Nature restores us because it is us. It is were we evolved to be.

The value of deep mapping lies in the shared experience, which I believe has the power to bring change and delineate the outlines of who we are as living beings on this planet. How we fill this space is up to us.

 

Author’s Bio

by Luciana Hermida

Artist and researcher

I am an artist and postgraduate student of MA Art in Science at Liverpool John Moores University. 

In my current research project 'Re-Imagining Ecosystems' I explore human connection with nature in the context of Hilbre Island. As part of an interdisciplinary team, I took part in Being Human Festival 2024 delivering an audio guided tour and a geomorphology workshop. I am currently delivering deep mapping workshops on Hilbre Island as part of my ongoing research about human engagement with nature.

Upcoming Deep Mapping exhibition ‘Re-Imagining Hilbre’
From 17.06.25 until 01.07.25.
> Find out about upcoming workshops here.
> Listen to Hilbre Island audio guided tour.

Luciana Hermida https://www.lucianahermida.co.uk
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The shared cartography of Hilbre Island