A Contemporary Rural II  Stories of the Territory

For the 2nd year, the studio has been immersed in the rural, engaging with the condition of modern nature*, a reality experienced by many, far from arcadian. Charting multiple walks in the rich, riotous territory of the Essex Estuary, pop-culture, film, photography and literature are used as means to interrogate and comprehend. A situated response is gradually formed, producing work that values and exploits the existing ad-hoc, incongruous situation, exploring questions around identity and displacement. Concerned again with re-populating the landscape, the studio asks what form a contemporary vernacular approach might take? Implicit is a counter-position, a bid for a more local existence based on a circular economy, a critique of mass urbanisation and consumer culture that favours a humane, place, landscape and climate-sensitive architectural response.

A territory long enmeshed in histories of radical settlement and ideologies, from Tolstoyan Purleigh Colony to Booth’s Salvation Army model farm- brickworks, Essex is a natural home for inventive thinking, the studio sits within this historical context; exploiting the ad-hoc languages of Basildon’s self-built Plotlands, coastal Radar Towers and Oyster Sheds of Mersea Island, seeking cultural continuity. Closer in, Mucking hamlet hosts layers of settlement from Roman to Anglo-Saxon, extensive 20^th Century gravel extraction and later, deep land-fill, resulting in a scarred landscape now slowly healing. Self-selected programmes produced rooted briefs, from horse sanctuary to experimental farm, Essex Wildlife Trust site, offering agrarian and production-based futures, set in drought and flood sensitive landscapes. Material strategies adopted local motifs, the clay of the estuary, the practice of Spolia encountered. A language began to emerge that sought to amplify and continue the regional timbre.

*Derek Jarman on Dungeness