An Idea of Landscape 2

In recent years, I have explored the marginal areas of southeast London, liminal landscapes where urban and ‘natural’ coexist. Indeed, distinct environmental categories - the city associated with work, mobility and alienation, and the countryside as rural retreat and harmonious isolation - are no longer adequate analogies of a contemporary experience.

Today, an idea of landscape is molded by what we witness through the glass barrier of a window or the windscreen of a train, bus or car. Landscape may be no more than a backdrop to life in transit. The time we have for comprehending our environment is interrupted by the immediacy and transience of modern life. We are overwhelmed by technologies that out-pace or short-circuit contemplation.

Beneath the rush of modern experience flows a current of slow history, evident in more permanent phenomena and topography - a natural order of dirt, trees, water, and stone. Our perceptual time encompasses both, and is forever in flux. In keeping with this, my photographs reflect a prolonged engagement, central to which is the activity of walking and observing. Represented, are the traces, the residue of signs marking the relationships of modernity and the underlying strata of a more enduring nature.