After my father died, I walked, day after day, the hillside and valley surrounding my gallery at the Clocktower in Low Wood. Walking became a discipline, then a method, then a form of attention. The images I made during that time slowly cohered around a single, insistent thought.
As I tuned myself to the land, to its overgrowth, its repetitions, its scars, I began to feel the presence of prior lives. Not as nostalgia, but as pressure. As residue. What emerged was an understanding of this terrain as the first post-industrial landscape.
Endings, beginnings, dreams, memories, hopes, ambitions, plans and prizes all rolled together in one vast organic, insistent, collaboration of sweat and nature.
Beneath the wild, the verdant, the lush saturation of organic colour lay the birthplace of England’s Industrial Revolution. Here are the quarries and canals, coppice woods and forges, packing houses and horse tramways, allotments, fisheries, pens, and fields worked by the first forge masters. The men who laboured here went on to construct a new iron world, and in doing so, they invented our most recent language of labour, ingenuity, and what it meant to be human.
The land they worked, exhausted, and ultimately abandoned has returned to nature. Unsupervised. Uncurated. Ignored. In that neglect it has become something unprecedented: a landscape beyond industry, yet irreversibly shaped by it. The first true post-industrial terrain.
The topography still speaks. Old bridle paths press faintly through the grass. Small holdings announce themselves as hesitations in slope and drainage. You learn to read the unnatural inflections of a hillside, the long, low alignments of rough-hewn cobbles. You catch, half-buried, the awkward angularity of an iron casting, its geometry alien to the vegetal logic surrounding it.
Everything is now green. Flourishing. The sharp profiles of hammer blows, once precise, once absolute, have been blunted, bent, and concealed. Nature does not erase; it edits. What remains are the first movements of a Daguerreian diorama: slow, soft transformations in which the earth subsumes Isaac Wilkinson’s audacious and ultimately corrupt ambitions, and the sneer of his cold command is folded, patiently, into leaf-mould and moss.
This is not ruin. It is succession.
And in that succession, the land remembers us more clearly than we remember it.
