Dust & Shadow focuses on derelict military fortifications, particularly German WW2 Atlantic Wall installations.
I became fascinated at how, as they decay and the landscape around them changes and subsumes them, they are losing much of their original significance.
The bunkers and gun emplacements are taking on the appearance of ancient monuments.
And for me that raises an interesting issue: we have little real understanding of what the standing stones and stone circles of neolithic times really meant to the people who built them. We can determine certain functions – burial and ritual (but what rituals?) – and we can reasonably deduce that the stones are in some way markers of the peoples' place in the landscape.
But we rarely stop there. Given that so many of us are prone to mysticism and spirituality, we layer on additional meaning, such as fancy theories about earth powers and ley lines. In other words, we exploit these ancient monuments to turn them into symbols of our desires and longings.
By treating the remnants of our more recent past as mystical artefacts, I'm trying to explore the idea that the real significance of monuments from any age doesn't reside in the objects themselves – that they have no intrinsic powers – but in us.
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