Forever Not England / London Review of Books

One of the highlights of last July's Alchemical Landscape symposium was the presentation by Rod Mengham and Marc Atkins. They delivered a piece based on their current project Fields of England. A resonant collaborative effort of text and image, Fields of England provides an interrogative cartography of the manifold spaces that exist under the seemingly clear heading of 'field':

We go into fields we have known for a long time, and others we just know about, but have never seen: battlefields, minefields, deserted village fields, fields undersea, gathering places, burial grounds, places of execution, places where treaties have been signed – but this is a list of field-genres. If we have learned one thing, it is the limitation of genre. There are as many genres as there are fields. And almost as many Englands.

Rod has recently added a text about the project to the London Review of Books blog. 'Forever Not England' also carries one of Marc's images, (a portrait of Sutton Hoo, Suffolk) and comes complete with the 'must-read' tags: "archaeology | brexit | england | history".  You can read it here. See below for images from the symposium.

Holloway

Rob Macfarlane and Adam Scovell recently teamed up with James Bulley, Stanley Donwood and Richard Skelton to make the 9-minute Jarman homage, Holloway. A spectral mix of Journey to Avebury, Scovell's previous super-8 films and Macfarlane's meditation on the area, the film formally examines the palimpsestual nature of "the sunken lanes in South Dorset that are known as holloways."

Describing the project Macfarlane notes:

I had become fascinated by these strange folds of land: by the manner in which history seemed to repeat – re-pleat – itself within and around them, across centuries, and by the patterns of echo and loop that I perceived the holloways as somehow generating. Super-8 – Adam’s preferred stock – seemed the perfect film on which to shoot this subject, given its palimpsestic surface and its shivery rhythms. I wrote a text to be spoken as voiceover, which I tried to ingrain with doublings and reversals (of image, word, sound). We wanted to make a film that cast a brief strong spell.

The film is viewable, along with a longer version of the above over at Caught by the River. Scovell has also documented the gestation of the project on his website. 

Sand

                                                           

Further to the last post regarding hidden beaches and things buried, please do check out the first notes for English Heretic's new project-in-progress, Sand. The post carries some typically resonant writing linking J.G. Ballard with M.R. James and Charles Manson with Robert Graves. As with Ballard's 'The Terminal Beach' this initial essay points to the fertile territory where the dust of the earth meets the lowland of the mind.