Recording Bodicote

Over six months, I photographed an area of land adjacent to my home. Within the last few years, the edge of this North Oxfordshire village has seen immense change, not only through large scale house building, but also the immeasurable, smaller alterations that are required when rural ‘improvement’ schemes are introduced.     In approaching this subject matter, I take my inspiration from ‘The National Photographic Record Association’ and ‘Recording Britain’ projects, initiated by the Victorians and continued at the outbreak of WW2. Wistful, humble, yet also an aspect of the process they document, these projects called on artists and photographers to record their own vicinity during a time of growing urbanisation.    The photographs I produced utilised techniques that designedly resist artistic control: photographs are taken during unsettled weather; brush strokes are erratic; the printing process produces images that are ‘incomplete’. This is reflective of the environment to which I am responding, one undergoing a process of transition. Through this work I am certainly drawing attention to those aspects of rural life threatened by 'improvement', but I also wish to question the 'conventional structure of retrospect' that Raymond Williams takes to be the established and nostalgic accompaniment to this. I am interested in reflecting on how my own work might engage and resist such nostalgia.    These images aim to respond to the uncertainty of the moment, rather than establishing a point of stability, from which the past can be fixed and mourned. We are living in a time of transition, one in which the question of what is to come and what is gone, is yet to be settled.