Project Peat

Kerry Morrison – socio-ecological artist

As part of the peat restoration work on Pendle Hill Summit, throughout 2018 and 2019 artist Kerry Morrison will be researching and developing creative ways to highlight the value of peat and engage local communities in deepening understanding around peat restoration.

Kerry is particularly interested in the parallels that can be drawn between the process of peat restoration and textiles: the knitting of the landscape, the repairing and stitching together of the hill. A performance involving local people and groups in early 2019, finishing off the restoration works, will further explore these links.

This research will inform a socially engaged interdisciplinary art and ecology project in 2019. There will also be two Peat Art and Ecology Conferences that join up this work with other Landscape Partnerships that have involved artists nationally, for example, Galloway Glens, working with artist Kate Foster.

PEAT

A blanket over the hill

Locking in carbon

Supporting wildlife

Holding in water

PEAT

In a broad brush stroke  

peat is a type of soil

a covering of earth

formed over decades and centuries and millennia

from decaying plant life

in particular, sphagnum moss species

strands clumped together

forming deep pile cushions

(Some Sphagnum Species, drawings by Kate Foster 2015)

(photo by Kate Foster)

There are a number of things that make peat particularly special and massively important:

• As the plant material breaks down into peat it locks in the carbon dioxide stored in the plant matter. Peat landscape are incredible carbon sinks
• Peat and the moss vegetation it supports hold water. They swell and shrink with wetting and drying. Like sponges, mosses and peat soak up and store rain water, helping to prevent storm water run off and flooding
• Peat landscapes support wildlife. Peat, as a very specific type of soil supports a specific ecosystem. The acid loving vegetation that grows on it, the insects that feed from that vegetation and the birds and mammals that feed on them are all supported by peat - and some are unique to upland peat landscapes. 

Bringing all this back to Pendle Hill…

the geology that is Pendle Hill is covered in peat formed over thousands of years

a blanket if you like

but sadly, this blanket’s quilt of vegetation is, in parts, missing

the peat is bare

vulnerable

to erosion

nothing holding it in its place

nothing growing that will decay and form more peat

with the wind and the rain

and footsteps of people and animals

the peat a top o Pendle Hill is washing, blowing and wearing away

this erosion is happening at a rapid pace

but it can be halted and the hill’s landscape can be restored

With thanks to Heritage Lottery Funding

The Pendle Hill Landscape Partnership is currently restoring Pendle hill’s peat landscape

and I

as an artist commissioned by In-Situ as part of The Gatherings strand of the Pendle Hill Partnership

will be communicating the process of restoration in novel ways

spreading the importance of peat

the importance of protecting the peat

at the top of Pendle Hill

to towns and villages and communities

around Pendle Hill

many ideas are flowing

the performative patterns of restoration

choreographed in the landscape

stitching the landscape together

weaving metaphors

spinning the connectivity

and interconnectivity

at the top of the Hill

and around the Hill

As an artist

exploring Pendle’s peat

It’s importance

It’s complexities

Why it is necessary to restore the peat landscape on top of the hill

The process of how it is being restored

will, over the next 12 months, be expressed through imaginative and engaging creative processes…