SCARS
Throughout England there are remnants of historic and prehistoric settlements, religious sanctuaries, and other infrastructure. Known as earthworks, these sites are most recognisable in non-urban, pastoral regions, often embodying a mound, ditch, or bank.
The pictures in this body of work depict ancient land use across the southern chalk counties. Making visible the form of the landscape, emphasis is placed on humans as an active participant in the shaping of it, through human/land relationships.
Nature reserves now inhabit iron age hill forts and new field boundaries overlay Celtic field systems. SCARS is drawn from the idea of the 'archaeological imagination’. Within this idea, land is seen through the sum of its history; moulded by the communities that have come before.
Place is approached through a relationship built on observation and research. Time is made visible by cultural strata within the contours of the earth, flattened by the camera, into a negative, exhibiting the form of accumulated history, mythologising reality into imagined space.