Living Landscapes

Contested Field was originally created for installation at St Petroc's Church, Bodmin, as part of Flamm '26, a biennial contemporary art festival which takes place in different towns across Cornwall.

This artwork asks many questions.  Why is place so central to identity? Is it because landscapes can imprint onto us, so become a repository of our memories? At the centre of this piece are two landscapes, marking places where a Bodmin soldier of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry (DCLI) was born (the parish of St Petroc's) and died (Armentières, northern France). They are outposts of an extreme shift in location and circumstance, unimaginable in today's connected world, that was a common experience for so many.  The images represent the landscapes as they are today.

How to put these feelings and questions into an artwork? How to signify hope and sorrow through place? Perhaps in the modelling of scale and light, the potentiality of half-light and in unyielding sunlight. Beauty has a role to play. Both land and memories are things we hold dear.

The landscapes are flanked by banners. In size and shape these echo regimental colours. In their colour, dye plant and material they echo uniform jackets from the early days of the DCLI. Even the colour of uniforms denoted rank. The ordinary soldier was issued with a jacket dyed with madder root, a cheap and common dyestuff, whilst officers bought their own uniforms tailored from cloth dyed with the more exotic and expensive cochineal. The banners are painstakingly and lovingly embroidered with words from members of the regiment who experienced war - those who fought and those who were left behind. They are from the rank and file soldiers and their families. The words are fragments of the ways people expressed to each other their feelings of loss and dislocation.  They are taken from material held in the archive of Bodmin Keep, Cornwall's Military Museum.

Twenty-one years of walking the coast gives rise to these images of some of our most fragile environments, with a unique ecology of plant life, where land meets sea.  These are liminal places.  There is endless variation in land, sea and light.

The  place where sea meets land, another country, just outside our domain.  A place of pleasure and also danger, one of our most precious environments.

Most of these images are views sailing around the Cornish and Devon coast.

Britain's ancient sites exist in special places.  Or perhaps they create special places.  There is a sense of time standing still.  Land on which monuments stand is little changed by modern times, while the land around it is constantly reshaped by us.  Past and present exist side by side.