English Pastoral
Ongoing series. 2021-present. The Lake District.
The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in a little life on the land. In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly might be a virtue.
James Rebanks
…these fields, these hills
Which were his living Being, even more
Than his own Blood--what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.
William Wordsworth
Reverence is the noblest state in which a man can live in the world. Reverence is one of the signs of strength; irreverence, one of the surest indications of weakness. No man will rise high who jeers at sacred things.
John Ruskin
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
English Pastoral takes its name from James Rebanks’ book about the changing landscape of the United Kingdom, sited specifically in the Lake District National Park. Drawing inspiration from the Romanticism of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Ruskin, and the picturesque modalities of 19th Century landscape painting, this series explores the spaces where nature, farming and tourism intersect. By examining the conflicts and confluences between the urban and the rural, tradition and modernity, the authentic and the ironic, English Pastoral playfully interrogates the aesthetics and limits of of landscape photography, and the roots of English identity.
