This ongoing project is shot entirely on the Pevensey Marshes and the South Downs, and evolved from the Pictorial project. I have experimented with a free floating 65mm simple lens (like a simple magnifying glass), hand-held in front of a pinhole attached to the front of the camera. Images taken with this are paired with images taken with a modern 65mm focal length dSLR lens.
Inspiration came from a walk in the Seven Sisters Country Park with my father. Looking across the wetlands at the South Downs, I felt that I could almost see a prehistoric landscape floating beneath the modern fences and pastures. The downs have been used since the mesolithic period and I imagined stone-age man fishing in the river and looking up at the downs as I was. Making images with apparatus simultaneously as simple as I could devise and also completely contemporary, I want to experiment with images that might be looking back for that vanished world underneath the modern landscape or, conversley, revealing modern details clothing the ancient geography.
Giles Stokoe 