ENVIRONMENT: Assessment Presentation

Environment Assessment Presentation

ENVIRONMENT: Test shots

LANDSCAPE: Chosen Location

The Local Nature Reserve (LNR) at Rye Harbour was established in 1970 by East Sussex County Council (ESCC) under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949. In November 2011 the management responsibilities were transferred to the Sussex Wildlife Trust.

The 465 hectares (1149 acres)are generally flat and low lying with no natural feature above 6m. and entirely within the Dungeness, Romney Marsh and Rye Bay SSSI (9,137ha.). The high points are the crests of shingle storm ridges built up over hundreds of years by the combined action of tides and storms. The low points are the sheltered areas between the ridges where saltmarsh developed on the regularly inundated land.

The influence of the sea has been greatly reduced during the last one hundred years by man-made sea defences. In addition, the naturally high water table has been lowered by a drainage system emptying into the rivers. These two factors have enabled a traditional agriculture of grazing with some arable. The loss of wetland has been partly offset by the extraction of the largest shingle ridges, creating pits. Within the Nature Reserve there are many habitats resulting from a variety of soils; a gradient of salinity; varying degrees of exposure to wind and flooding by the sea; water level; and different management practices. The main habitats can be broadly described as: intertidal; saltmarsh; reclaimed saltmarsh; drainage ditches; shingle ridges; sand; marsh; pits; scrub and woodland. Consequently there is a great variety of species with 3,300 recorded so far. These include more that 150 that are considered rare and endangered in Britain.

The area also contains considerable historic interest with military fortifications from the 16th, 19th and 20th centuries, a lifeboat disaster and evidence of man's early and continuing efforts to defend the land from the sea. This flat, open and historic landscape, with its low level of development, proximity to the sea and network of footpaths is popular with visitors. It can provide a very special experience. There is a good network of footpaths that enables much of the Nature Reserve to be visited from access points in Rye Town, Winchelsea Beach and Rye Harbour. There is a small, unmanned information centre in the car park at Rye Harbour, but our main centre, at Lime Kiln Cottage, is opened on most days by volunteers (10am-4pm). All five bird watching hides are accessible to some wheelchairs and provide visitors with a close view of much wetland wildlife.

Video tour of the Pillboxes I photographed for my final images.

ENVIRONMENT: WW2 Sites in Kent

ENVIRONMENT: Erasmum Schroeter

Erasmus Schroeter’s background in the tightly controlled society of the former German Democratic Republic provides the context for two different collections of work in one exhibition. The core theme within these two bodies of work is the juxtaposition between the individual and the collective worldviews developed in the socialist GDR during the forty years of its existence between 1949 and 1989.

As an “alternative” artist in the GDR, Schroeter experienced everything that the Stasi, the notorious secret police, could throw at him. This gave him both an enduring mistrust of monolithic political ideologies and the freedom to take on taboo subjects such as Nazism and German militarism. The East German society in which Erasmus Schroeter’s career developed possessed a questioning creative spirit, borne of a personally experienced repression unlike anything in the west.

Obsolete almost as soon as they were contructed, the huge bunkers of the Atlantikwall were built to protect the coasts of the Nazi dominated Festung (fortress) Europa. As they have crumbled and decayed they have become monuments, not to ‘heroic’ struggle but to the folly of military conceit. Bathed in theatrical light, the luminous colours, imposing scale and crumbling ruins of Schroeter’s Bunkers create a panorama which is both utterly arresting and wholly repulsive. Violence and beauty shift in and out of focus as the German Romantic landscape of longing, immortalised by Caspar David Friedrich, is co-opted by Schroeter for purposes, which are anything but.

The architectural rationale which underpin both Bunker and Bild der Heimat are pervasive ideologies. Yet, although the architectural vestiges of Nazism and Stalinism maintain a clear presence in the cities, countryside and coastlines of contemporary Germany and beyond, they are often invisible to the untrained eye. Schroeter work makes it impossible for these ideologies to conceal themselves and therefore to remain Hiding in Plain Sight”.

ENVIRONMENT: Pillboxes

Pillboxes are concrete dug-in guard posts, normally equipped with loopholes through which to fire weapons. The originally jocular name arose from their perceived similarity to the cylindrical and hexagonal boxes in which medical pills were once sold. They are in effect a trench firing step hardened to protect against small-arms fire and grenades and raised to improve the field of fire.

The concrete nature of pillboxes means that they are a feature of prepared positions. They were probably first used in the Hindenburg Line. This is likely to have been the time when they acquired their incongruous English name. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest record of the use of the word pillbox in connection with a defensive post is from 13 September 1917, after the German withdrawal onto the Hindenburg Line.

Pillboxes are often camouflaged in order to conceal their location and to maximize the element of surprise. They may be part of a trench system, form an interlocking line of defence with other pillboxes by providing covering fire to each other (defence in depth), or they may be placed to guard strategic structures such as bridges and jetties.

The French Maginot line built between the world wars consisted of a massive bunker and tunnel complex, but as most of it was below ground little could be seen from the ground level. The exception were the concrete blockhouses and pillboxes which were placed above ground to allow the garrison of the Maginot line to engage an attacking enemy.

About 28,000 pillboxes and other hardened field fortifications were constructed in England in 1940 as part of the British anti-invasion preparations of World War II. About 6,500 of these structures still survive.

Pillboxes for the Czechoslovak border fortifications were built before the Second World War in Czechoslovakia in defence against the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. None of these were actually used against its intended enemy, since the German military met no resistance when invading the country because it was effectively forced to capitulate as a result of Allies annexing the country's border areas and handing them to Germany, but some were used against the liberating Russian armies. The Japanese also made use of pillboxes in their fortifications of Iwo Jima.

ENVIRONMENT: Jane and Lousie Wilson

Young British Artists and identical twins Jane and Louise Wilson collaboratively explore sites rich with dark associations—ranging from former Nazi interrogation rooms to failed examples of modernist urban planning—in multi-screen video installations and photography. They are fascinated by altered states, paranoia, and lingering energy in unpeopled spaces.

“A lot of our work has been about architectural, psychological sites where the sense of space and place feeds down into their own narratives, introducing a performative element in terms of a person or a persona.”

Jane Wilson

Large-scale photos of the broken and decayed World War Two bunkers that litter the Normandy coastline of northern France form the basis of the series ‘Sealander’.

Devised by Turner Prize-nominated twins Jane and Louise Wilson, the eight large-scale photographs are part of a multi-screen installation called Sealander. The black and white photographs are monumental and compelling, picturing edifices that in many cases have become repositories for graffiti and litter and a space of shelter for local tramps. They also occupy a space between land and sea, carrying the very real scars of the battle to rid Europe of fascism, and for the artists they now seem to defy any sense of time and place.