Beating the Bounds

Inspection Pit resides at the foot of the South Downs National Park, an area designated as a place of outstanding natural beauty, which has been frequently remodeled by human activity over thousands of years. Neolithic flint mines, burial mounds and hill forts demarcate it as an important site of ancient commerce and defense. Most formatively, during the Bronze Age, vast areas of woodland were cleared to make space for sheep grazing, which makes up the majority of heathland we see today. The chalky well drained soil and grazing patterns of sheep have given rise to what is known as old chalk grassland, a short tufty grass characteristic of the South Downs. It is a rich and biodiverse environment where wildflower meadows and butterflies thrive.

By the 1920’s environmentalists were concerned about the destruction of the natural environment, due in part to increasing housing developments, and began to call for the downs to be designated as a national park. However this was disrupted by the outbreak of the second world war which had a profound impact on the area. The chalk cliffs provided a physical barricade with artillery and fortifications set up along the coast to protect against invading forces. Lights were installed upon the downs to confuse overflying Luftwaffe bombers into thinking they were shelling the nearby port town of Newhaven. As a consequence of Britain’s increased need for self-sufficiency in food production, the heathland that made up 40% of the South Downs habitat was plowed out to make way for arable farming. Only 2-3% of this land exists as heathland today. In 2010 the South Downs finally became a national park, conserving the remaining “untouched” areas of the landscape. Although protected, this grassland is left scattered and the scars of human intervention are visible from Winchester to Eastbourne.

This exhibition takes its title from an old English custom - Beating the Bounds - which traditionally involves communally walking the parish boundary, swatting local landmarks with branches in order to draw and maintain a shared mental map. Through the collective act of walking, communities are able to record the history of a place, share the melody and words of songs, tell stories and pass on local traditions, preserving them all in a vat of regional memory. Every seven years this bizarre ritual is performed, bringing with it an opportunity to learn how the landscape has evolved. Perhaps land has been sold off or acquired through housing developments and agricultural expansion. Roads may have been built that cut across and divide the original boundary line. Sycamores could have taken root and grown into young trees, or streams formed by flooding and erosion. Maybe deer, badgers and ramblers have trod new pathways through forests and shrubbery. This exhibition examines these shifting boundaries, the varying effects that chance and intentionality can have in shaping our relationship with the land and how a collective understanding of the environment can be a method of preservation and restoration.

Rhian Harris-Mussi investigates the aerial view and its role in revealing the dramatic effects that human activity can have on landscapes and how an elevated perspective can obtain valuable insights into changing environments. Much of the source imagery used in her work bears the traces and scars of history. Aerial reconnaissance photography has an undeniable duplexity, it is both bound up in human endeavor and destruction. Its use in the First World War enabled the redrawing of outdated or incorrect maps, which increased the accuracy of air-strikes and combat strategy, quite literally weaponizing the landscape. Images taken in this period now document how key events such as warfare or agricultural revolution have reshaped the environment over time beyond recognition. Kasmir Malevich, the inventor of Suprematism and a leading figure in the creation of Abstraction viewed these images and recognised the possibilities this new technology had in radically reframing our perspective as well as its potential dehumanizing effect, writing:

“The familiar recedes ever further and further into the background ... The contours of the objective world fade more and more and so it goes, step by step, until finally the world – ‘everything we loved and by which we have lived’ – becomes lost to sight.”

Fast forward and Google Maps, a satellite powered aerial mapping service, observes from space every corner of the earth as a 2D plane, allowing us to witness the alarming rates of change. We can see that much of the earth is broken up into geometric patterns; precise borders that demarcate carefully managed and controlled environments, allowing little space for the wild and unruly. This technology can be used to forecast and speculate on what our landscape might look like in years to come, a process of eradicating unpredictability and constraining nature’s ‘chaos’.

Finlay Abbott Ellwood investigates the notion of chance in relation to prosperity through the symbol of the Samara seed, sometimes referred to as a helicopter seed. Samara seeds have evolved to grow wings allowing them to stay aloft for longer as a method of dispersing themselves further from the canopy of the parent tree decreasing the chance of overcrowding and thus any risk of nutrition deficiency. As the seed matures and dries it falls from the tree, spinning like a helicopter it travels downwards in the wind, lands and germinates. Where it lands will greatly affect its chances of success. Abbott Elwood not only uses this symbol to question the destructive human activity of land artificialization- the process of urbanization which results in the reduction of our wild spaces and pollution of surrounding areas- but also to explore the chance effect of place and time. The Samara seed for Abbott Ellwood is analogous to human existence in the way that ‘not one of us can decide where we land in this world, whether it be fallow flagstone or fertile furrow’. The location, time and situation a person is born into greatly affects one's chances of prosperity in life. The histories that the individual is connected to and the boundary lines of their community both physically and ideologically, can greatly shape their future.

Science and science-fiction have long predicted our present day circumstances, foreseeing us looking down upon ourselves like gods, but perhaps we need to think in a more localized way and to restore the connections we have lost with our natural habitat. Ursula K Le Guin’s novel The Word for World is Forest encapsulates the alternate view that growth and our need to expand is ultimately destructive. In the book humans have exhausted the resources on Earth and the most valuable of all, wood, becomes an outer space commodity. Planets are burnt up, pillaged, their inhabitants enslaved and brutalized. It is not hard to see the parallels Le Guin is trying to make. In Abbott Ellwood’s work, secateurs become a symbol of minimal intervention, only taking what is necessary to encourage other areas to grow freely and contribute to a thriving ecosystem.

Harris-Mussi and Abbott Ellwood’s practices collide on the horizon line, a drawn link that connects each of their concerns surrounding earth bound histories, traditions, landscape, ecology with aerial technology, space exploration and terraforming. The horizon line works as a nexus between earth and sky, between the known and unknown, between experienced pasts and imagined futures. If Harris-Mussi’s marquetry works investigate at a macroscale, through the aerial view, questions about how we interact with and use the landscape, Abbott Ellwood provides an alternative viewpoint on a microscale, up close and on foot. His deeply personal and intimate paintings advocate for a richer and more profound experience with the environment. Beating the Bounds calls for a collective approach, to walk the parish boundary and to radically change our relationship with our shrinking natural habitat.