DUMNONIA
Ritual, Science, Faith and Farming. A few ways in which humans have interacted with the Devon landscape. From The Bronze Age through the rise of Christianity up to the modern day, Dumnonia looks at the complex relationships we have with the ground beneath our feet. Walking through stone circles overlooked by granite quarries, the desolate and seemingly endless procession of plantations, listening to the orchestral movements of a geiger counter measure radon particles as flocks of chaffinch call across the expanse, menhirs now christianised crosses and gatekeepers called to service by ancient monuments.
Trudging across the late-autumn landscape of Dartmoor, it was of prompt clarity to me that this was a landscape that demanded attention, an attention to which I’d never directed toward any landscape I’d stepped upon before. Collapsing and folding unto itself, the sparse and shrouded weald of Devon’s backbone presented itself in a muted and subdued glow, that foreign body of light we call “Sun” barely acknowledging the ground I led underfoot. This Bronze-age landscape was truly that, one who’s ruins and remenants led a processive rearward call towards time and then back some more, and once again further.
Dumnonia publication from Bracken Books, 2024
Giclee print on context natural paper
Swiss binding with Mid Green colourplan cover
Thermographic silver print cover & poem
Edition of 250
Published by Bracken Books, 2024
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I step across the earthly expanse,
Rocks drowning in mud and peat.
There, on the hillside, an enclosure made of stone is placed.
I think to the livestock that would have roamed this small hill box,
What gods they lay their hearth down upon,
I think to my sea at home, and the men that tended to the waves for the good of their kin.
The felling sound of men escapes the tree line and breaks this thought in two.
I am left standing at a cross,
For something so hallowed,
It looks to me like a serpent escaping from hell.
The mist congeals at the rise,
The parliament of great stones loom and speak,
Passing knowledge of my tomorrows between them.
They know, but I do not.
What tomorrows lay ahead?
I step upon the earth,
And find out day by day,
But never knowing of its fixture
Until it is already passed.
They breath in deep time,
For I must appear a speck of dust,
Floating in the mist.
My sorrows and joys a leaf floating down stream,
Until I am tossed to the waves.
- Dumnonia translation in Modern English.