Exploring this
excavated landscape has for me been an exploration of the re-colonisation of
this once industrial and now strangely lawless place. The exposed geology, and
scattered remnants of man’s presence, in what is now a theatre for new
activities and a sheltered refuge for emergent creatures and plants. The bones
at the bottom of the cliff faces evidence of the sharp invasion of the wooded land,
the sudden-ness of the missing earth. The tracks in the mud, the rusting
artefacts, the plants reclaiming the beds of gravel and the echoing calls of
the nesting crows and kestrels in this sunken lost world. I wander as a
traveller looking for evidence of these stories, taking the emotional and
biological temperature of this enclosed otherworld. Using the conventions of
exploration and collection I mount miniature expeditions, over night camps and
order and frame my finds with aesthetic taxonomy in an attempt to capture
something of this place of echoes, both literal and metaphorical.
