Richard Keating Artist

Richard Keating

  • Community Orcharding

    Deep Encounters is a “Walking the Land” project initiated by Janette Kerr. Fourteen of us are deeply encountering a small parcel of land of our choice.

    My choice of site is The “NortonWood” also known as the “Jolly Foresters” Community Orchard, a restored orchard on an east facing slope, beneath a beech wood, overlooking the Nailsworth Valley and surrounded on three sides by housing.

    Location of Norton Wood and the community orchard. The community orchard is a partnership with the Town Council who own the site. The orchard had been a part of a cottage garden and came into public ownership when it and the nearby “Jolly Foresters” pub and its car park were sold. A group formed to restore the orchard by planting Gloucestershire apple varieties.

    Working the land as deep encounter.

    Whereas previous generations worked the land, many of us have lost this contact. This includes loosing contact with growing and harvesting food, seasonal cycles, local traditions, recipes and neighbours. It has also meant living without the uncertainty of a harvest and livelihood dependent on weather, without hours of back breaking work and the high levels of depression suffered by many farmers today.

    I used to walk there regularly with our dogs Nell and Maggie and have for a number of years been a member of the group looking after the orchard. My deep mapping explores my relationship with the other than human and my activities as a part of a community of place.

    Nell and Maggie were always ready for a walk through the orchard and up into the woods. They are no longer alive and I miss being a part of their pack. Amongst other things they helped me imagine living in earlier millennia; nothing but rain, sun, storms, woodland, deer, boar, bird song – human and dog, They helped me to understand being in place as sharing moments in time and yet timelessly, always playfully! Yes, a romantic vision of life in the valleys but a rejuvenating daily experience.

    Our project was guided initially by the following references as stated on the Walking the Land website https://walkingtheland.org.uk/:

    We see this (Deep Encounters) as an exercise in deep mapping; an intensive look at a particular place that might include geography, history, and ecology. Some call the approach ‘vertical travel writing’, while archaeologist Michael Shanks compares it to the eclectic approaches of 18th- early 19th century antiquarian topographers, or the psycho-geographic excursions of the early Situationists.

    ‘…..Places are not stable; they mean different things to different people – even different things at different times. The deep map recognises the slippery identity of place, and seeks to visualise the multiple identities that go towards constructing the human experience of place’. https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/lakesdeepmap/the-project/gis-deep-mapping/

    We increasingly need to work in “the curious space between wonder and thought” a space where….“there is no single Disciplinary (in an academic sense) voice” (geographers Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift), …. the: “space–between representation and reality, language and life, category and experience” (feminist philosopher Geraldine Finn).. (see https://www.iainbiggs.co.uk/2014/10/deep-mapping-a-partial-view/)

    I was particularly interested in locating this “space–between representation and reality, language and life, category and experience”. To do this I chose to use What3Words and photography. This was initially to recognise that walking a line around a site develops an sense of control over it, creating a definition of it, and I was looking to become more immersed to explore my relationship with it.

    My first series of located photographs using What3Words were in response to Tim Ingold’s ideas about mesh and grid. In conversation with Henrike Neuhaus and Désiree Coral (https://www.artscabinet.org/encounters-issue-1/a-conversation-with-tim-ingold)… Ingold criticises Deleuze’s use of these terms, saying “If you are familiar with Deleuze’s idea of striated space, the problem with that notion is that it mixes these two things up. It fails to distinguish between the grid and the mesh. One kind of striation is when you’re a cartographer and you draw a grid. You lay out the grid and you locate all the objects you’re surveying on a particular location in the grid. That’s a way of measuring things up with standard units. But if you’re a weaver or a farmer ploughing your field that’s quite different. Because then you’re laying down the lines in a movement that is very haptic, that involves immediate bodily engagement with materials. It’s not the same as imposing an abstract grid upon the materiality of the earth.” My own methodology in using What3Words is to play with ideas of locating specific responses to located places, to purposely examine the relationships between an ‘overlaid, abstract grid’ and an ‘attached, felt meshwork’. It could be seen as humanising the grid or more-than-humanising the grid.

    Spring! We’re expectant

    no bandage, just gardening

    we’re orchard keepers.

    As I walk in the orchard with the idea of mesh rather than grid, I come to understand this as a centuries long dichotomy and wonder if they are mutually exclusive.

    The roman layout for the nearby town of what’s now Cirencester. Is the way we organise the spatial layout of towns a constant balance between our need for order – the grid, and our desire to engage with place in a less rational, more emotional way – the mesh. This town plan isn’t that dissimilar from Los Angeles or Milton Keynes.(Street Plan from the Corinium Museum, Cirencester)

    I wonder how much this question underlies my earlier practice as a landscape architect whereby the inclusion of planting, sensitivity to landscape and access to nature is a way of bridging that dichotomy. And I suggest that its a tension within us, a dependancy on order, structure and routine and a need for disorder, improvisation and a taste of chaos. Rather than following theories of psychology and neuroscience however about control and loss of control, instead the psychology around ‘Nature Connectedness’ as set out in the Journal of Environmental Psychology,Volume 24, Issue 4, December 2004, Pages 503-515 in the article by F.Stephan Mayer and  Cynthia McPherson Frantz. Their article “The connectedness to nature scale: A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature “seems to be central to Deep Encounters and a way of further exploring the relationship between grid and mesh and line.

    Yes, line. My second series of explorations used line to locate Finn’s “space–between representation and reality, language and life, category and experience” with a focus on time.

    March to June 2026.

  • November 2025

    First Friday Walk. Bone Scan Cheltenham General Hospital and Norton Wood, Nailsworth.

    ‘Between Worlds, Between Times, Between Mediums’

    thanks for the prompt Tamsin Grainger.

    A radioactive in-between-times walk

    I was walking both inside and outside. This was in itself a metaphor for passing between worlds. The inside was mainly in hospital where my own inside, my bones were being scanned. I was very aware of the portals that are a part of passing between worlds – between states of being, between times, between being and maybe not being.

    After I’d been injected with radioactive isotopes, I had a lot of time to wait around – waiting is itself being between things and between times. Walking changes waiting to doing, to being. So in-between times Helen and I took a mildly radioactive First Friday Walk outside.

    This in-between-times walk was about changed states – particularly inside and outside the hospital, particularly the wonder of autumnal changes and eventually returning inside to the hospital and a still meditation inside me. I think of changes as a series of in-between states and processes. Temporary encounters with an ongoing series of remembered and shared moments and experiences of our time on earth. Our time walking the land.

    January 2026.

    Running the equivalent of a Marathon to raise funds for Prostate Cancer research.

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    Park Run, Eastville, Bristol

    March 2026

    Radiotherapy Running: I had 20 days of radiotherapy in Cheltenham Oncology Unit; five days a week. Although it was hard to find the time to run I wanted to keep running as a part of my treatment. I was aware of the radio waves attacking my body and attempted to replicate this in my drawings.

    19/03/26

    21/03/26

    24/03/26

    Images developed as a part of making a thank you card for the radiography staff

    A Poem by Jon Seagrave.

    what.3.words:

    deep.encounters.poem

    for.richard.keating

    it’s.a.process:

    the.tree.unfolds

    as.we.unfold-

    rooted.in.place,

    evolving.in.cycles.

    we.make.marks-

    yours.with.line,

    mine.with.words

    searching.out.ways

    to.honour.duration.

    what.3.words?

    some.important,ones:

    people.places.nature.

    art.love.running.

    just.keep.going.

    By Jon Seagrave, poet-in-residence, Cheltenham Hospital Oncology Department, Mar 2026

  • engaging with the assemblage, First Friday Walk in the Park and Museum in the Park.

    this is where the blog finishes – or maybe pauses – while the research is written-up.

    The projects and interventions haven’t stopped – they have developed and changed and this change in context, in some part influenced by the practice outlined here, continues to influence and change the practice.

    So, the blog is stopping at the point where I paused and reflected with partners and co-researchers and the wider community on the work. In a way the writing up is a prolonged pause and reflection, the results of which will be written-up in the thesis. I hope to post it here sometime in 2015. Meanwhile the rawness of this blog is reference for the creative process – working to create a community-landscape aesthetic as a way of engaging people with landscape and influencing decision making processes.

  • engaging with the assemblage, First Friday Walk in the Park and Museum in the Park.

    The primary purpose of the assemblage was to make the research available and in doing this, the intention was to enable people to engage by adding to the structure. This could be done in a number of ways – by adding red or green strips of cloth, by making drawings and by weaving drawings into the structure.

  • installing the assemblage

    as with a lot of my installations, despite the long run-up period of researching, at the time of installing, it is a live event. The time taken to chose and cut the ash, the time taken making the drawings, the time taken working with others to collect information, all inform decisions made during the installation, but it also throws up new challenges. Possibly the biggest unknown in this case was the lighting and throwing the shadows on the wall. There was a large degree of serendipity in this process, similar to that experienced while walking and casting shadows on the drawings.

    In the same way that preparing for the installation had helped inform decisions, the activity of hanging and weaving work into the installations was an opportunity to think through how to further engage people with it over the coming days and weeks. This backward and forward looking aspect of the activity is an important aspect for me.

  • installing the assemblage

    I had help with the installation, Helen Keating, Alison Parfitt and Lucy Guenot had helped cut cloth and write the words that I had taken from the River map discussions onto the strips of cloth. Kel Portman and Alison helped with some of the weaving in the museum. As I hung and wove into the ash frames, adding drawings and sketch books, makes and postcards, I was aware of the shadow drawings appearing on the walls and aware of creating both a structure/space and its projection.

  • developing work for assemblage

    As well as developing the ash weaves, I had been talking with Clive Chinnick, of Chinnick Theatre Services, about making a lamp that could be hung amongst the weaves and as the only light source, would caste their shadow on the walls of the gallery. I had also considered much lower lighting with each visitor being given a wind-up torch. This is probably a good time to mention how accommodating and helpful the staff at the Museum in the Park were.

    While the idea of people making their own light was appealing, along with the whirring of the wind-up torches, reminiscent of both bird song and light industry, I decided on the option that for me talked about us all being between the sun and the land, all casting our shadows.

  • developing work for assemblage

    The red and green ribbons became a metaphor for the co-creation of landscape – the red about human activity, the green about landscape’s agency. This was also expressed in the book I was making to accompany the installation. The book was about three facets of the emergent practice – collaborating, encountering and exchanging.

  • developing work for assemblage

    Decided to continue with the wood weaving. Although the loom perhaps had a more direct link to the weaving metaphor that I had adopted, weaving wood had a more direct link with landscape and was in its very production, managing the landscape, albeit it in a small way. After experimenting with a few species, chose to use ash – it is supple, good colour and bud’s are great nodules. Also much to be cleared and coppiced from a landscape management point of view. Ash die back also a factor as was their frequency as the rubbed tree on the woodland pilgrimage. How much the landscape would change without them.

    Using red cloth to tie them symbolised how weaving has co-created the landscape, the landscape represented by green cloth.

    Although the massing of the ash weaves was visually appealing, it did not reflect ideas of moving through, being a part of. The overall design for the installation was to create walking experiences, to create an open space. Nevertheless, I was keen to play with the shadows that a the structures cast – an added dimension and commentary on both the affect of landscape on us, and our effects on it.

  • tutorial

    Tutorial in Stroud with Professor Andrea Liggins, Dr. Rob Newell and Dr. Catrin Webster. Discussion about the two ideas under development. Included visit to the Museum Gallery and discussion about how the work might be hung.