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.
