Sophie
Standford
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A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
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@hortus_silvam

A Rural Idyll Selected Work

Trooper

A moving image work made from the act of walking, documenting the length of time it takes to walk a local public right of way across a field of densely mono-cropped wheat in the heart of rural Suffolk, pausing for breath from the effort of clambering the ‘ploughed and cropped’, deeply furrowed path.

Trooper questions the concept of ‘nature’, the perceived ‘rural idyll’: the profligate use of chemicals; genetically engineered technologies turning fields into labs, 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 swing of the microphone in the momentum of walking buffeted by wind adding to the discomfort of the experience. The protagonist moves through the landscape their presence inferred. The whispered voice of foreboding recounts the health and safety guidelines of wantonly discarded Trooper® herbicide containers.

Trooper can be a site-specific installation screened as a perpetual loop at life size, projected into an empty grain store, a farm building typical of the landscape from which Trooper emerged and for which the crop in the video is destined. The viewer confronts the disquieting scale and presence of the barn and adjusts their senses to the video illuminating the gloom of the far back wall, drawn in by the disembodied whispering of the soundtrack.

“A daily walk takes around 1 hour, exploring the local public footpaths, trying to avoid the single track roads as far as possible; where cars, vans and heavy goods vehicles hurtle into each blind bend.
   
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.”

Trooper® is an emulsifiable concentrate 
containing 60g/l flufenacet and 300g/l pendimethalin.
A herbicide with residual and contact activity for the control of black-grass, annual grasses and broad leaved weeds in winter wheat and winter barley.

© Sophie Standford, 2025
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