Altered Ground.
‘Open space has no trodden paths and signposts.
It has no fixed patterns of established human meaning;
It is like a blank sheet on which meaning may be imposed.
Enclosed and humanised, space is place.
Yi Fu Tuan
Altered Ground explores the evolving relationship between land, transformation and human intervention. The work addresses change as a visual expression of landscapes disturbed and reimagined. It is an enquiry into the overlooked stages of transformation, those moments where land ceases to be pure ‘space’ and begins the slow, complex process of becoming ‘place’.
Construction sites, excavations pits, severed hillsides and mounded earth, these spaces of flux reveal a raw authenticity often absent from the polished final outcomes that replace them. These sites are neither purely natural nor fully artificial. They exist as liminal spaces, charged with tension, potential and loss. They are spaces in transition, caught in a state of flux; they are already becoming places sites layered with new meanings, new histories and new emotional resonances. Place is after all space shaped by experience, memory and emotional investment.
In these alterations of the land, place is not defined by completion, but by experience, by attention, by the accumulation of marks, both deliberate and accidental.
Through the act of walking, moving slowly and deliberately through the landscape Whyte engaged directly with spaces, observing details that would otherwise go unnoticed.
This work is a meditation on presence, on attentiveness, observance and the quiet power of transformation: in the land, in the human condition and in the spaces that slowly, irrevocably become ‘place’.
‘Each area altering dramatically, each visit offering new creative possibilities. Construction hoardings meander snake-like through the landscape, ground overturned and inverted, trees witnessing these transformations, stand still and majestic, their roots spreading out amongst the rubble. New roads cut through the landscape awaiting their purpose as buildings rise up from the ground brick by brick’. Dianne Whyte.
