A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Photomontage
Performative Drawing
Act of Listening
About
@hortus_silvam
2022-2025
performative action; moving image; sound; writing
A ‘rural idyll’ through the act of walking, seeking a relationship between places of increasing marginalisation and the body, documenting the length of time it takes to walk a local public right of way across a field of industrial mono-cropped wheat in the heart of rural Suffolk.
Single channel HD video with stereo sound and text
Cinematic screening: 8 mins 25 sec
Gallery | Site specific exhibition: Continuous loop with sound
“A daily circular walk can take around 1 hour, following 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 chemical 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. Protruding hummocks of uneven grasses hint at the roots of absent boundary hedgerows against a wind that now tortures these flat exposed plains.
Scant remnants of poorly managed scrub protect unwitting pheasant for shooting. Any remaining scraps of hawthorn, clinging to the scoured ditches, toppling at the roadside, are brutally flayed, torn, ripped, wrenched, year after year; the splintered shards challenged to survive.”
Wheat field 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. Wheat field 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 adds 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 herbicide used. Wheat field had a working title Trooper* after the brand name of the wantonly discarded chemical herbicide containers found in the field and in the surrounding drainage water courses, and finding consolidation through the recent discovery of the work Wheatfield-A Confrontation, 1982 by Agnes Denes.
*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.
Location: Suffolk, UK
Selected work from the project: A rural idyll, made through the practice of walking, observing and listening to places of increasing marginalisation, where the rural and the industrial intersect and elide; where genetically engineered technologies turn fields into labs blurring the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic. This is a lonely place of disquiet which reflects a bewildered disbelief at the damage we wreak on the natural world.
landscape, rural, environment, marginalisation, walking, listening,
© Sophie Standford