Episode 13: Between Land and Water
In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, Rebecca Burns speaks with Dougal Kirkland, an artist and printmaker whose work explores archaeology, folklore, wetlands, queer ecology, drawing, writing, and the material processes of image-making.
The conversation begins with drawing. For Dougal, drawing is a way of recording what is seen, and a way of thinking with place, objects, histories and landscapes. Whether drawing from archaeological sites, museum collections, wetlands or plants, the process becomes a way of slowing down, observing closely, and allowing the inner world and the outer world to meet on the page.
Dougal shares his research into wetlands and bog landscapes, which began to take shape after encountering and drawing Lindow Man at the British Museum. This meeting was both intimate and unsettling: a preserved body, removed from the bog that had held him for centuries, now lying behind glass in a museum. From that encounter came a desire to imaginatively return him to the wetland, and to think more deeply about what bogs hold, preserve, conceal and reveal.
Dougal discusses bogs as liminal places: landscapes between land and water, stability and movement, preservation and decay, human history and more-than-human life. Wetlands carry ecological importance, folklore, danger, strangeness, nourishment, memory and deep time. They are places of sphagnum moss, peat, hidden pools, will-o’-the-wisps, boggarts, offerings, bodies, ritual deposits and stories that resist being made simple.
Queer ecology runs through the conversation, and how wetlands open up a different way of thinking about nature, identity, history and belonging. Dougal reflects on how bogs ask us to question simple categories, and how their in-between qualities resonate with queer theory, marginality, fluidity, ambiguity and resistance. The episode covers queer plants, botanical colonialism, bog bodies, ritual death, the Weerdinge Men, the Roos Carr figures, and the possibility of thinking with wetlands as landscapes that hold difference rather than erase it.
The episode closes with Dougal reading Emergence, his written piece centred on the last day of Lindow Man, imagined as a queer ancestor. The piece draws together archaeology, folklore, plant lore, queer ecology, environmentalism, ritual, deep time and the strange intimacy of the peat. It asks what it means to emerge from a landscape that has preserved you, and what kinds of histories might still be waiting in the wet places we have been taught to overlook.
This is a conversation about the places that refuse tidy boundaries.
Between land and water.
Between body and archive.
Between ecology and myth.
Between preservation and transformation.
Between history and imagination.
Between the known and the unknowable.
It is an episode about wetlands as living archives, drawing as a form of attention, and queer ecology as a way of reimagining relationship with the more-than-human world.
Bio
Dougal Kirkland is a British artist, writer and printmaker based in Stroud Gloucestershire. His drawings and paintings explore landscape as place of quiet mystery and psychological depth. He draws inspiration from archaeology, ecology and folklore, often bringing a queer perspective to his practice. Dougal studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths (2017), and a postgraduate scholarship at the Royal Drawing School in 2022 where he was awarded the ACS Drawing prize. He currently has works in the Royal collection and private collections internationally.
Links
Find out more about Dougal’s work:
Instagram: @dougalkirkland