A few examples from the perimeters series.
A few years ago, I was returning to Norwich on a bus from London. With time
to look out of the window, I was struck by the abundance of anonymous
disused areas of land, usually at the perimeters of factories, airfields, car
parks, supermarkets, etc. Places often used for ‘fly tipping’, and so full of
unwanted objects and detritus.
Coming up through Essex and then Suffolk, I was reminded of how different
our 21st.Century landscapes are to the pastoral idylls of Constable’s world.
Nevertheless, as a child growing up on the edge of an industrial town, these
were the very places friends and I liked to seek out, searching for dangerous
play things and always with the background thrill of ‘trespass’.
On one level they are unwanted eyesores and a constant reminder of our
throwaway society, and that we human beings seem hell bent on soiling our
own beds. On the other hand, and certainly for those of us brought up in
more innocent and freer times for children, these places have a nostalgic
element, and so as honest representations of landscape in our particular
time, I felt they were worth recording.
I didn’t set out to record in a hard gritty industrial fashion, but rather to allow
elements with a more traditional aesthetic reputation to be included. As in
real life, a satellite dish will sometimes be juxtaposed with a passing cloud,
the security lamps surrounding a disused factory will cast interesting
shadows into an abandoned shrubbery, etc.
Soon after starting this series of drawings, someone drew my attention to a
book just published called Edgelands by the poets Paul Farley and Michael
Symmons Roberts…a series of prose essays on the very same subject, and
highly recommended. Perhaps a case of zeitgeist.
Four of my drawings from this series are now held in the permanent East Contemporary Art Collection at the University of Suffolk, Ipswich (Waterfront Gallery), curated by Robert Priseman and Simon Carter.
