looking through — Helen Terry

Sally and I made another visit to Wicken Fen earlier this week on what turned out to be an uncomfortably hot day. There is little natural shade, there was virtually no breeze and, although the hides provided some shelter, as well as being hot they were also stuffy! Not the most comfortable conditions for our third research visit, but we did our best and stayed until evening, drawing and taking photographs. By 7pm the light was glorious and golden … and the heat was finally relenting.

Wicken Fen at early evening. August 2016. Helen Terry

The Fen is still overwhelmingly green. The reeds and sedge have grown up above our heads in places so you cannot see over but are left to peer through. The leaves on the willow, alder, birch and hawthorn look dull and tired. To me, all this foliage is a barrier – it conceals the underlying structure and I find it rather uninteresting. I am impatient to see the leaves off the trees and all the greys and browns of late autumn and winter. But greenness is so characteristic of this place that I may need to make peace with it and see what I can do.

Wicken Fen hide. August 2016. Helen Terry

I don’t think I wrote about our second visit, but every time we’ve been so far, Sally and I seem to be drawn to the hides. We have been photographing through the holes in the walls and the slit windows. One hide has opaque plastic windows and partly conceals the view in a way that interests us. Other visitors were clearly bemused to find us kneeling on the floor pointing a camera at a hole in the wall or drawing what we could see through a closed window!

Opaque windows. Wicken Fen. August 2016. Helen Terry

I am interested in how the hides cause you to see the Fen in sections or fragments. Pursuing this idea I took a small mirror with me this time, propped it against the window and started photographing the reflection. What really interested me though was the juxtaposition of the reflection and the view through the window – and in some cases a secondary reflection in the window too. The result is a combination of landscape fragments that is definitely something to explore further.

Mirrored landscape. Wicken Fen. August 2016. Helen Terry

Mirrored tree. Wicken Fen. August 2016. Helen Terry

I am very excited to be starting a new collaborative project with artist Sally Tyrie and on Friday we made an initial research visit to Wicken Fen. This is one of the National Trust’s oldest reserves (acquired in 1899) and one of the last remaining un-drained areas of the East Anglian fens. It is an exceptionally rich wetland habitat.

At this time of year, the dominant impression is greenness. The fen is a mass of tall sedges, grasses and reeds in brilliant emeralds and yellow greens, threaded through with traces of red and rust orange. Flashes of yellow, magenta, blue violet from the many marsh flowers – including orchids. It was gorgeous … but I am really looking forward to seeing the Fen in the winter when the green is bleached out and the underlying structures are exposed.

I’ve visited Wicken before but it was a long time ago and therefore it was like discovering the place afresh. There is that initial phase of orienting yourself within a place – finding your way around, noticing what you notice, what you choose to focus on. As ever, I was consistently drawn to details – marks and traces – reflections, linear marks, particularly of the reeds and sedges at the water’s edge.

But it’s interesting to experience a place with someone else – two pairs of eyes. Sally noticed things that I might have passed over – expanding my awareness, widening the range of things I noticed.

We were drawn to the hides – both the structures themselves and the experience of looking out of them. As well as the viewing hatches, many of them had random holes in the walls (Birds? Knot holes?). So there were lots of ways of looking out, looking through, peepholes, slits, cracks.

Worn and weathered plastic windows veiled and obscured the view – they simplified what you could see into shadowy outlines, veiling and obscuring as much as they revealed. –partial information, selective. My attention moved between the marks on the surface of the window itself and what you could see through it.

Marks on the surface and shadowy landscape beyond

(By the way my new “dream studio” is a wooden shed on stilts, with hatch windows and a good view … although maybe not for wet work.)

No preconceived ideas about what work might result but lots to think about. There will be more visits, visual research, drawing and thinking with a view to developing work for an exhibition sometime next year. So expect to be hearing more about the fens over coming months.

Visit Sally’s web site to see her work and follow her side of this collaboration.