My PhD project, due for completion in late 2027, argues that landscape architecture's professional and institutional armature privileges representational and technical communication methods. Expressive modes of knowing exist within the discipline but tend to remain excluded by default — under-taught, under-valued, unspoken.

What is the role of expressive, situated writing in landscape architecture? What forms of knowing and relating does it make possible that representational language leaves unexamined? In other words, what happens when expressive writing is treated not as supplementary to landscape architecture, but as a landscape architectural mode of knowing in itself?

In my experience, increasing digital mediation and economic pressure in practice distance practitioners from direct, embodied site experience, making affective and intuitive landscape knowledge harder to access. This is increasingly relevant as ecological and climate crises demand new ways of relating to land.

My PhD project is practice-led and creative, grounded in the specific landscape of Dyarubbin (the Hawkesbury River) on Darug Country, where I live and work. Dyarubbin is treated as a research interlocutor and companion, not a case study or setting. Methods include situated creative practice (lyric essay, ficto-criticism, field writing), discourse analysis of landscape architectural language and theory, and engagement with a lineage of landscape writing and writers.