by Sarah Pierce
The origin of the map is lost to history. No one knows when or where or for what
purpose someone got the first idea to draw a sketch to communicate a sense of place, some sense of here in relation to there. It must have been many millennia ago, probably before written language. It certainly was long before the human mind could conceive of the worlds beyond shore and horizon, beyond Earth itself, that would be embraced through mapping.
John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers
For Annabel Howland it is by moving in between the marks and lines, the routes and channels carefully charted by cartographers, that we know a place. Where the mapmaker’s measurements serve to abstract physical dimensions by rendering them in diagram, Howland’s methods retain a sense of space which are bound to her own optic evaluation of a given location. Rather than objectively calculating distances, she connects photography and animation to the physical experience of viewing. How we move through a place, the way we go, the route from A to B, is contingent on the viewer’s orientation to the image. It is our perception of un-mappable terrain, shifting borders, and the expanse between sky and earth that interests Howland.
The site of her most recent project, Drains, Cables, and Cuts is the Fenland landscape of the East of England. Using the large number of family members she has scattered around Norfolk and Suffolk as her base, Howland explored the region by car and plane, traversing the various arteries that comprise the Fens.
Typically described as a type of low-lying wetland, the Fens derive most of their moisture from groundwater (fen meant ‘soft’ in Old English). The region consists roughly of a twenty-mile radius reaching from The Wash, south to Cambridge, west to Lincolnshire and east to West Norfolk. As its name implies, the area around Cambridge known as Silicon Fen is a hub of high-tech industry. The Fens were largely flooded until Charles I and a group of adventurers led by the Earl of Bedford commissioned the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to design a system to drain the land, transforming it into the fertile farmland it is today. The operation was completed in 1637. Traces of this geographical intervention are apparent in the region’s nomenclature: Forty Foot or Vermuyden’s Drain, South Holland Main Drain, Labour in Vain Drain.
Howland now lives and works in Amsterdam where her studio overlooks the wide man-made waterways that circumvent the city’s north side. There is a peculiar symmetry between the place she lives now and the locations of her childhood. A physical proximity connects the Netherlands to this particular area in England, and geographically the Fens resemble their Dutch counterparts. Yet, unlike the heavily populated Dutch countryside, the Fens retain a sparseness and remoteness captured in the psychological aura of the terrain.
Over a period of several months, Howland conducted multi-faceted research into the Fens. To coincide with her excursions to the region she amassed a comprehensive body of source material drawn from the area based on everything from facsimiles of seventeenth-century maps to snap-shots of local farms. The bleakest images were taken during winter. Here, tarmac roads surrounded by water meet a horizon of grey sky. The correspondence between these remote moments and the artist’s aerial photographs of the Fens forms the foundation of Drains, Cables, and Cuts. To create the work, she charted rural routes to fly over, making a series of photographs looking down over the landscape. These at first recognizable aerial shots are systematically cut out and blown up, which destabilizes our perspective and dramatically shifts the image’s horizontal planes. The organization of space is relevant to Howland and the digital blotting out of certain areas in her animations refers directly to the cutting away of surplus information in her large-scale photographs. The interplay between organic and geometric markings in each piece presents a survey of relationships. Land here is less a cohesive whole and more a series of integrated units. Each image carries its own organizing principle. At times, the world of the Fens is little more than strips of black and grey where the coordinates of clouds and rivers meet. At others, colourful and variegated networks of openings and contours portray a layered and porous land.
In exploring the Fens, Howland chartered flights with local pilots, including one in a retired 1944 RAF plane. From the sky above, vast views of farmland give rise to a geographical history of the land that borders on modern-day Silicon Fen. Traces of channels silted up centuries ago can be seen connecting the underlying layers of adjoining fields. Along The Wash’s saturated shoreline, outlandish artificial islands—bombing range targets, redundant radar islands, trial freshwater lagoons, it’s hard to tell which—sit like abandoned UFOs. Embedded in the landscape is a centuries-long story. Every drain, cable, and cut tells a tale of resourcefulness and reinvention. The residue of land-based technologies, from canals to semiconductors, chronicles generations of inhabitants making a living off the land. New boons come together with old challenges. Today, just as high-speed broadband networks launch an era of connectivity, rising sea levels, combined with potentially unfeasible sea defences, threaten to inundate the land again.
From her aerial cut-outs to close-range photographs taken on the ground, Howland's work depends upon abstractions and manipulations that reinvent our relationship to landscape’s formal or pictorial elements. As a photographic process, her methodology is as analytical as it is inventive. From the initial ‘proof’, she embarks on a series of actions, based on the careful interpretation of information or content inherent in the original. If the basis of photography is to make a latent image visible, Howland pushes this established procedure by systematically locating an image within an image. Her identification of details which reflect relationships that occur within the image relates to actual spatial dimensions outside the image. As discrete works, Howland’s imagery relies on a precise interface that connects the viewer to another place.
It is thought that the Babylonians may have been the first to produce a map of the world. What they did not know, the lands beyond their own, they chose in their maps either to ignore or to fabricate. Drains, Cables, and Cuts tells about the Fens, but more importantly it tells of a variable land of sky and water. In her aerial views, Howland leads us to a ‘world beyond’. The margins of each image designate the limits of perception, of what is known and observable. The edge of the world marks the beginning of the horizon.
Sarah Pierce is an artist who lives in Dublin.