Terra Incognita

By Kat Gollock, Zoe Hamill

3 June 2025

Artists Kat Gollock and Zoe Hamill introduce their 2025 project, Terra Incognita, which questions the political power of mapping through a series of walks and workshops by the River Tweed.

"Between words is silence, around ink whiteness, behind every map’s information is what’s left out, the unmapped and the unmappable…to acknowledge the unknown is part of knowledge."

~ Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit meditates on the idea of maps, and particularly the words Terra Incognito, a phrase used to denote “the big blank spaces on old maps”. But, as time has proven repeatedly, these Terra Incongita, the plural form, are never blank. There is always life and regardless of whether it’s ‘discovered’ or not, it still exists.

Maps may enable navigation but those which many of us use today are still imbued with their colonial and capitalist histories. Traditionally created for merchants and armies, many maps were guides to stolen lands and the decimation of the people that lived there and their resources. Today, many maps hold the tacit purpose of conquering or vanquishing, even when they are used for leisure pursuits like walking, climbing or cycling. OS maps, for example, owe their origins to the English military’s repressive campaigns against rebellions in Scotland in the 18th century. Such maps still act as a reminder of what constitutes ‘ours’.

Made through the eyes of their creators, maps are invariably incomplete. Even at a 1:1 scale, a map is still only ever a partial representation of a place, unable to measure or record the deep layers of the life, histories and stories that shape it. The grass changes, the rocks move, and the plants grow and die and breed and flourish. A river, especially, never stops moving and changing.

Taking inspiration from the idea of Terra Incognita as that which is yet to be known, the aim of our project is to provide alternative ways of gathering, understanding and mapping the River Tweed through the lives that exist within it, both human and non-human. The project brings together alternative photographic methods and plant-based developing techniques derived from the flora of the river, alongside research, writing and sharing to build towards a collaborative piece of work that aims to create a more inclusive map of the middle section of the River Tweed.

A cursory online search of the River Tweed brings up salmon fishing and common ridings; an image search of artworks of the River Tweed in the National Galleries of Scotland returns only paintings, photographs and drawings by men. If that’s all the information that remains readily available, that’s all that people will see and learn about. Whilst these facts and these works are part of the narrative, there is and should be so much more.

As two women who spend a lot of time outdoors, both through our practices and the places we were raised, we are acutely aware of the ongoing lack of representation, in both photography and the natural world. Women, along with many others from different classes and races, have often been excluded from histories of place and landscape. For this project we have come together to try and widen the net of who gets to document the land and how.

Kat’s landscape is the Scottish Borders, on the banks of the River Tweed where she grew up and still lives, and Zoe’s landscape is in Northern Ireland, and the small townland where her family have lived for generations. The histories of both these places have been obfuscated, hijacked by those in power, and extracted from the day-to-day experiences of all who live there. Flora and fauna are housed in specimen cases, material objects are stowed away in museums and archives.

At the same time, people’s lives have been left unwritten and unarchived simply for the crime of not being wealthy enough or ‘man’ enough. All these stories from below, rarely documented in the shift from feudalism to capitalism, agriculture to industry, analogue to digital, are the casualties of a history of power. In these worrying times, as things shift so far to the right, and the wrong 1% continue to dictate narratives, it feels more important than ever to work towards a shared commons.

Regardless of who you are or where you’re from, this project is simply about sharing those moments, when at one point or another, you experience the River Tweed. And whilst we’re aiming to make these lesser seen elements more known, we’ve no intention of dictating the narrative or claiming it as our own. Unlike maps of the past, we’re interested in the idea that there are things we will never fully know or understand: for us, this landscape will remain Terra Incognita and belong only to the river and all those who inhabit its banks; an unconventional field guide that exists as the antithesis of the map that claims the world for itself.

Forthcoming events as part of Terra Incognita include: