2008 Vanessa Margetts

Vanessa Margetts is a Founding Director of MudMap Studio. She brings design and visual arts experience to her work gathered while working with communities around Australia and overseas in Denmark, East Timor, India, Honduras, Columbia and Brazil.

MudMap Studio specialises in community driven public art and landscape architecture. Vanessa collaborates with community and stakeholder groups to create public art and landscapes that respond to site and are embedded in place and community. Through an open design process, Vanessa listens and learns from the people she’s designing with. This collaborative process ensures that MudMap Studio projects tell a unique story, and share knowledge of place.

Vanessa graduated from the Bachelor of Landscape Architecture at UWA in 2008. She is interviewed here by Amy Stewart, as part of the UWA Master of Landscape Architecture unit LACH4421: Australian Landscapes.

Amy Stewart – What kind of projects do you work on at MudMap Studio?
Vanessa Margetts – It's a landscape architecture and public art practice. A lot of the work I do is based in Broome. I have probably worked on over 100 projects there over the last 15 years, most of which were in collaboration with the Yawuru People who are the Traditional Owners of Broome. We mainly focus on cultural management planning projects like cultural centres, cemeteries and resting places. A lot of the work I do is about healing and integrating storytelling and truth-telling into the landscape through art.

AS – What made you interested in studying landscape architecture?
VM – I completed my first degree straight out of high school in Visual Arts at Curtin. And while it was amazing, I think I was a bit too young to really appreciate or understand it at the time. After that, I went exploring and adventuring for a couple of years and ended up living in a remote part of Colorado in the USA. Living in the mountains, I began to gain an appreciation for being connected to place and to Country and I started to wonder how I could integrate that into my life and work in a creative way. I found landscape architecture to be a good balance of creativity and connection to place.

AS – Who has been a person of influence in developing your approach to landscape architecture?
VM – I had Greg Grabasch for the professional documents unit and I found his
approach to work pretty interesting. I started to talk to him about the work I should do for my honours project and he was so warm and forthcoming with information. He set me up with some contacts in Broome whom I worked with through my honours, and I am still working with those people today. He was very influential to me and was very generous with his knowledge and I really appreciate that.

Christopher Vernon was fantastic. He took us to do a studio in Lucknow, India which was so exciting. Christopher was so supportive and encouraging and he gave me the confidence to embrace the style of work that I wanted to do. I’m very dyslexic and have always been attracted to children’s books. He introduced me to a whole lot of American kids’ books from the 60s and the graphics have really influenced my own style. He gave me the confidence to break out and to know that what I was doing was OK. I don’t know how he organised it, but my folio from that semester was printed in an Indian landscape architecture magazine. It was really out there, with bright colours and crazy graphics. They printed all ten pages in the magazine and that gave me a lot of confidence.

At the time when I was at uni, there were a few key teachers that we had for a lot of different units with – Christopher Vernon, Tinka Sack, Karl Kullmann and Grant Revell. I think the combination of all their different characters, personalities and strengths was quite beautiful and really beneficial to me.

AS – What was your most memorable class, and why?
VM – I have a story about my first pin-up. I had come from a visual arts background at Curtin and we were always taught to be really out there and really pushed the boundaries. So, in my first week of landscape architecture, I went to uni and they said the homework for the first day was to create a series of differently textured drawings on postcards. I thought, “Ok, I’ve got this,” because my major at Curtin was fibre and textiles. I put together all these bits of paper with different textures and painting and ink and all this crazy stuff – the postcards were falling apart. I pinned them up and everyone else pinned these postcards with different pen work pen weights – stipple and cross hatch. I was mortified. I really wanted to take them off the wall and run away. I thought, “I can't do this degree. This is not for me.” The teacher was so supportive and she was just like, “These are great, these are amazing,“ and she told me I should sew all my work. So for my first semester, I sewed my whole folio and all my line work was on done on the sewing machine. It was actually pretty terrible because it's really hard to draw sections and plans with a sewing machine.

AS – What did you learn at UWA that has been most influential during your career?
VM – I I learnt to follow my instinct. I often did things a little bit different to other people in the class and sometimes that felt a bit isolating – or like I was doing something wrong. But looking back now, it taught me to trust my instincts on projects and on people and to be strong in what I believe in. Being able to trust that you know which projects you should take on and which ones you shouldn’t and making sure those projects are run in the right way.

I also learnt to follow what I’m interested in. It’s really hard to be passionate about something and to do a good, meaningful job if it’s not something you’re interested in. I think our industry is so personal and it's so intertwined with our lives and other people's lives that you can't really do it if you're not fully passionate and don't believe in it. So I learnt to find the things that get me excited and to pursue them.

AS – How has your definition and understanding of landscape architecture changed throughout your career?
VM – When I went into the course at UWA, I thought landscape architecture was about designing spaces and leaving a physical thing behind. But I’ve learned that it’s more about getting the process right.

I thought I needed to design, but it’s more about facilitating – and as I get further along, I’m learning more and more that my role should be even more invisible. It’s about being as quiet as possible through the process so that the right people can have the opportunity to talk and make decisions. I need to be as quiet as possible to enable and empower people to heal their Country or to care for Country. A lot of the work I do is about truth-telling and bringing up stories and sharing knowledge. It’s really about listening.

AS – What are your ideas about the role of landscape architects?
VM – I spend a lot of time thinking about how the process will look and who will be the people involved. There is definitely a very large role for us, but it's not designing and it's not necessarily standing in front of a group trying to facilitate, it's maybe sitting in the back of the room taking notes and driving from the back. It’s also using our knowledge of construction and our expertise in running projects, especially if it is a project that’s going to have a built outcome. But that's a very practical input. It's not the heart and soul of the project – that doesn't come from the landscape architect it comes from the community, enabling the community to have their voice.

AS – What is one issue that you feel landscape architects have a role in addressing?
VM – I've spent a lot of time thinking about reconciliation and what it means on the ground, and I think as practitioners we have the opportunity to make choices about the kind of work we do, setting up the correct processes, and working out how we can empower Aboriginal people and allow the right people to be speaking and leading projects. Our work is so integrated in the land. We’re changing something that's so old and so rich with story and history and culture. It's so important that we get it right.

We should always look for opportunities to create programs or policies that better the quality of life of First Nations people. Sometimes I’ll look at back at a project and the outcome might be one thing, but the process has been so important, it potentially has changed people's lives.

That goes back to respecting Traditional Knowledge, paying Elders like you would pay engineers or other professionals for their knowledge and always looking for projects that make anchor partnerships and connections.

AS – Is there any advice that you’d like to give to current students?
VM – It’s probably to listen a bit more – really, truly listen and don’t rush. We have a tendency to try and get things done and be productive. And sometimes I think we need to slow down and be more thoughtful. Slow down and get things right in the beginning. Also, trust your instinct and follow your passion. There are so many different ways you cantake landscape architecture that I think it’s really exciting because it means that you can put your own personal spin on it.

This interview was undertaken in 2022. It has been edited for clarity and cohesion.

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Image 1: Liyan-Ngan Nyirrwa in Broome, Image 2: Vanessa Margetts and Martha Lee in front of the Nagulanyurdarny Warli community mural (via mudmapstudio.com)