Jason Gathorne-Hardy Animals in the Landscape
Looking at a topographical map of East Anglia, emptied of its roads, a fascinating vision of the landscape emerges. It is one huge, low-lying estuarine basin. A land of mudflats, marshes, water meadows, farmland and woodland. It stretches from Southwold in the North to Gillingham in the South, embracing the estuaries of an extraordinary family of rivers - the Blyth, the Alde, the Deben, the Orwell, the Stour, the Colne, the Blackwater, the Crouch, old Father Thames, the Medway and, finally, but by no means the least, the Swale.
East Suffolk lies sandwiched in the middle of this basin and is home to the Alde and the Deben. Between their mouths, at Shingle Street and Bawdsey, and their sources, North and West of Framlingham, these two rivers give a signature to the local landscape. They descend from the clay, meander through loamy meadows and estuarine marshes before emptying into the sea. Imbibed with the spirit of the rivers, the land in between is a mixture of arable farmland, pasture, woodland, reedbeds, saltings and shingle - an intimate, gentle landscape that becomes more open and wilder near the coast.
If the passage of water gives a lie to the land, then the animals that inhabit it add to and reflect its character. In East Suffolk, pigs live on the old heath, whilst sheep and cattle graze the low-lying meadows and marshes; domesticated geese stay close to their farmsteads, along with chickens and ducks, whilst seagulls and plovers roam free on the coast; and dogs accompany their owners, most of the time. In putting on this exhibition I have sought to tell a story about this beautiful part of the country through drawings of the animals that live in it.
Jason Gathorne-Hardy, May 2003 |
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