Trooper
exploring the meaning of rural in a fragile landscapeSingle channel colour HD video
with stereo sound, 8’25”
Location: Suffolk
Trooper questions the perceived ‘rural idyll’; the profligate use of chemicals; the impact on our environment, landscape, wildlife, human health; the fragility of the Suffolk landscape; the monotony of walking footpaths that cross acres of mono-crop.
Trooper is the culmination of several years of spontaneous intermittent filming and sound recording while walking the local footpaths. The protagonist moves through the landscape their presence inferred. The whispered voice of foreboding recounts the health and safety guidelines of wantonly discarded herbicide containers.
The footpaths cross fields and force the walker to engage with industrially farmed land, whether the soil sits bare or under fleece, ploughed into deep channels or harrowed to a fine tilth, violated with scattered vestiges of war - fine white crystals, a crimson coating - wheat, barley, sugar beet, rape.
Rarely is a footpath preserved, so armed with secateurs the fight is on in the belligerent assault of the relentless crow banger. Depending on the weather, the barren, exposed soil weighs heavy, or is cracked and desert dry, dissipating with the wind.
For miles, these battle fields support the monotony of mono-crops. Occasional tufts and hummocks of uneven grasses hint at the roots of boundary hedgerows against a wind that now tortures these flat exposed plains. Scant remnants of poorly managed scrub to protect unwitting pheasant for shooting.
Any remaining scraps of hawthorn, clinging to the scoured trenches, toppling at the roadside, are brutally flayed, torn, ripped, wrenched, year after year; the splintered shards challenged to survive.”