In the south west of England are stretches of cliff, the strata of which were buckled and folded as a consequence of mountain building events, on what is now the European continent, around 300 million years ago.
The climate on this part of the coast is oceanic, and under these conditions temperate rainforest grows. The rainforests depicted here represent some of the final remnants left in the British Isles, some sites are considered to have been permanently wooded since the beginning of the Holocene.
Anticline brings into dialogue these two kinds of sites. Through this marriage of seemingly disparate phenomena, ecology and deep time are considered in relation to one another.
This work was prompted by an interest in the idea of ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, the idea that successive generations become accustomed to increasingly deteriorated landscapes, at a rate that is too slow to cause alarm.