In the spring, I began to look at a field beside a brook. I had photographed it over winter flooded and drier in spring. This field is river catchment and flood plain edge; both on the water’s edge and under it. It’s low lying, between two parts of the Ampney Brook. Using 19th century maps, I have been researching the past of the landscape around the village. In the map of this field I read its old, dried mill leats, evidence of ditches, former sluices, attempts to manage, control the water. Perhaps if these were still maintained water-logging/flooding would reduce. Walking, I observe/notice these in signs in the landscape – the plants become watermarks revealing the past, water present in the varying growth.
To represent the layers of past narrated in the field I turned to cloth and stitch. It layers up beautifully, and I could dye it with plants gathered from the place. I was also reminded of a something that I read a few years ago.
“In the language of nineteenth century clothes-makers and repairers, the wrinkles in the elbows of a jacket or a sleeve were called ‘memories. Those wrinkles recorded the body that had inhabited the garment. They memorialized the interaction, the mutual constitution, of person and thing.” Peter Stallybrass – Marx’s Coat 1998
Likewise the stuff of landscape archaeology, the lumps and bumps, verdant or struggling grass that marks the ground revealing the memories of landscape past beneath.
1830’s & 20th Century maps overlapped
