The Loire Valley
Setting up a second studio in Bué, a small village in the centre of France, gives me an opportunity to explore the very different, but equally working landscape of vineyards around Sancerre. Intensive cultivation, in many ways similar to that of the Fens, imposes a geometric grid on htis hilly landscape, which it radically transforms to meet human demands. In this case, not so much a modern landscape, though machinery is involved now, but one with centuries of tradition and close-knit communities behind it.

Soundscape and landscape
My work is not conventional landscape. It is more about place and relationships that shape the countryside. This demands unconventional ways of exhibiting the results. Flat Earth 2007 was staged as an installation in a darkened basement gallery on the Barbican Estate, with 28 unframed images tightly hung to a single horizon line around a cubic space. The idea was to confront an urban audience with a visual space that challenged their assumptions about the countryside and agricultural production.

I wanted to include sound captured at the scene of the photographs in that installation but struggled with the technical execution. I am now experimenting with a digital recorder and hope to make some progress soon.

Sound is not something we tend to notice yet it dominates our lives. The modern landscape is drenched in man- made sounds of machinery and traffic, and bereft of the silence that used to pervade the countryside. Rarely do we experience silence now, or properly hear the low level sounds of animals, birds, insects, and the wind in grass and reeds.