Wealden by Rob Pursey

I took a series of pictures to accompany an exhibition at Tenterden Museum. The exhibition is based around a piece called Wealden – a collaboration between poet Nancy Gaffield and musicians The Drift – whose main theme is the man-made changes that have affected, and continue to affect, the Kentish environment.

Wealden deploys this one little area of Kent as a microcosm for the global changes that characterise the Anthropocene era. The pictures I’ve taken are intended to communicate the beauty of these places, but also to emphasise that they are, to a greater or lesser extent, man-made environments.

When we admire them we aren’t looking at timeless natural beauty: agriculture and industry constantly alter their contours, and climate change will, sooner or later, affect them more profoundly. These fields that currently cultivate wheat would once have been heavily wooded. And Tenterden may find itself a coastal town again, as rising sea levels reclaim the marshland that farmers have spent so many centuries draining.

Wealden is published as a CD and pamphlet by Longbarrow Press.

Rob Pursey