The sinewy landscape of black earth, the tough metallic waterscape of drains that suck their colour from the sky, the butch pumping stations and uncompromising silos are, whatever their appearance may tell us, fragile, threatened. They exist on borrowed time. Jonathan Meades, 2019

Growing up in the Fens, I became accustomed to the ‘three-quarter skies’, the vast openness of vistas across exceptional farmland and relentlessly long drains which occupy the landscape. I am increasingly interested in the history of the place, the peat-laid land documenting stories from the past.

The Fens consists of Grade I agricultural low-lying land, reclaimed from former marshes, in the East of England, covering areas of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Attempts to drain areas of the Fens began as far back as the thirteenth century. Today, 286 pumping stations work to move water away from the low-lying land into approximately 3,700 miles of artificial drains and rivers, which pump water back into the Wash. However, the Fens are sinking; it is a consequence of human alteration of the landscape. As water is drained from the land, the peat soil shrinks, gradually lowering the ground. Over thousands of years, this depression has unearthed an ancient history of the Fens; the oaks of high forests, over five thousand years old, preserved in the peat. The alchemy of the Fens acts as a camera-less photographic medium, capturing and preserving memories of their past, as well as reflecting the present context of anthropogenic change.

The impacts of climate change threaten the area, and my project uncovers stories of the past and documents how the ordinary can become extraordinary. I consider how the landscape of the Fens is a vessel that holds memories and operates as media. I achieve this through a series of black-and-white analogue photographs. The images are reproduced in a hand-made concertina book that reflects the never-ending illusion of the fenland landscape. Bog oak is another element in the project; through experimentation, I made paper with its fibres that act as the substrate for printed images of the environment. In this way, the ancient physical remains of the place act as a medium to reflect the present.