a rural idyll

exploring the meaning of rural in a fragile landscape
 What does ‘rural’ mean in the context of industrial farming practices? Are we aware of the damage these efficiencies of scale are inflicting on our natural world?

This is an ongoing series of moving image works made in and about Suffolk, which call attention to our unresolved and contentious relationship with nature, reflecting a bewildered disbelief at the damage we wreak on the natural world.
Trooper
breath

wait-a-minute
melt
when the wind blows

Suffolk is an unsettling, eerie landscape that haunts the imagination, overshadowed by the battleground of human choice and behaviour. Beguiled by a nostalgic notion of ‘rural’, a violence simmers under the mysterious secrecy of unspeakable farming practices. Reliance on chemicals is profligate, habits degraded and lost, birdsong is absent, biodiversity diminishing.
© Sophie Standford, 2024