The fears of globalisation, colonisation and nationalism enmeshed within the Anthropocene can all be seen in Virgil’s Georgics, the blood and soil, the notion of the soldier farmer, agriculture as a martial force, empire, microbiology, commodification of landscape, civil war, crop rotation, migration and the uncertain topographies of time.
These threads are teased out throughout my practice, and within this project, I document the literal and metaphorical unearthing of these entanglements, using walking, deep listening, tasting and the use of metal detectors to trace the layers of contemporary and historical materiality within the soil of this place. This allows us to wander the edgelands, not only of Quicke’s farm, but of the text, the marginalia, the paratextuality of the Georgics.
What is your experience of landscape? Do you recognise it in terms of literary description, do you appraise it with a farmer’s eye, do you feel it with your hand?
This was the opening premise of my collaboration with Katharine Earnshaw and Mary Quicke. Katharine is a classicist with a keen interest in material ecocriticism and cognition, whose expertise centres upon Latin and Greek Hexameter poetry. Mary is the fourteenth generation of Quickes to farm the land at Newton St Cyre’s, producing prizewinning cheese.
Katharine drew us together initially to explore our differing relationships with land, how each of us approached it in a different way. Katharine is quick to bring relevant stanzas of Virgil’s Georgics to attention, recognising the parallels between the descriptions therein and the physical landscape in front of us. Mary intimately knows this landscape, each stile, hedgerow, the dates of trees planted, the best slopes for different crops, she reads its curves from a map like braille.