Matching Green

I am developing a body of work that explores the concept of the ‘betweeness of place’ (Entrikin 1991) and our facility in the 21st Century to describe landscape. Key to this research are the ideas of place as anecdotal and how our understanding of place can both be disrupted and enhanced through the process of teletechnologies (Virilio 2006) i.e. through speed and slowness – and the impact of these on the imagining of nature and the cultural articulation of landscape.

'Matching Green' was a site-specific video installation commissioned for ‘Common or Garden’ an exhibition on village greens across Essex under Border Dialogues – a three year Epping Forest Arts (EFA) project funded by Arts Council England to take artworks to a wider audience across the EFA district. Using the languages of documentary and an anthropological gaze this work is an exploration of ‘Englishness’ and the quintessential village green. Members of the community of Matching Green are asked to describe their landscape, the village green. They speak of the green and what it means to them through their memories and anecdotes. Most struggle with a description of the topographical features, the aesthetic and material nature of the green, and turn back to their narratives revealing how they and others activate the space. The work functions as a video landscape without the view.