2011
Warplands website is here.
As part of the Impact Fellowship award, Professor Mike Pearson was commissioned to create a new performance 'soundwork'.
Working in collaboration with composer John Hardy, Mike created Warplands, a piece that combines text and musical composition. Created in both live and web-based forms, Warplands builds directly upon the approaches and techniques of the Carrlands project.
Warplands is situated in North Lincolnshire, and is inspired and influenced by a number of different sites, landscapes and environmental processes. The sites include:
Julian’s Bower is a unicursal turf maze, 43 feet (13 m) across, lying in a small depression on a small plateau close to the cliff edge at Alkborough. It may be of Roman or Medieval origin, the earliest firm documentary evidence dating from 1697 when it was noted by the Yorkshire antiquary Abraham de la Pryme.
Alkborough Flats is the first coastal realignment site to be developed as part of the Humber Shoreline Management Plan and the UK’s largest managed realignment site. The site is managed to encourage biodiversity and the development of a variety of different habitats including inter-tidal mudflats, fresh and salt-water reed beds as well as wet and dry grassland.
Ousefleet According to the Ordnance Survey Landranger map series (comprising 320,000 squares) a field in North Lincolnshire is the most featureless part of the UK. The square kilometre on the outskirts of the village of Ousefleet, near Scunthorpe, has nothing in it except a single electricity pylon and some overhanging cable.
The text draws upon the published work of early topographers, regional archival and literary sources as well as maps and photographs in order to illuminate the historically and culturally diverse ways in which a particular landscape has been made, used, reused and interpreted and to help make sense of the multiplicity of meanings that resonate from it.
The soundwork is in two movements, created around the notion of prospect: one located at the turf maze at Alkborough and looking down from the limestone escarpment; and one at Ousefleet in the Warplands themselves.
photo: of John Hardy, courtesy Warplands website
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