Five Square Kilometres, The Dark Peak

Alison Lloyd

Five Square Kilometres, The Dark Peak, 2014 ongoing

Before the Coronavirus Pandemic lockdown began I was developing a new project that would take place in the Dark Peak, Derbyshire. I was considering how walking and camping on my own could facilitate a closer relationship with an area that I was walking repeatedly since 2011 as a recreational walker and much more intensely as an artist since July 2014. I was hoping to work with and shadow the National Trust’s moorland reclamation project. As I documented my walking and associated activity I selected the images that included all the paraphernalia of walking, rucksack, map, flask, and compass. I also noticed that I was including ‘barriers’ between myself and the camera, often moorland vegetation.

My interest in the flora and fauna and the terrain through which I walk is important but for now remains more incidental to the final photographic documentation that I produce. As I have watched at a distance the reclamation work on the moors I have developed a curiosity and an interest in these changes and in working alongside or perhaps in collaboration with other disciplines working to reduce the peat erosion and re-establish areas of blanket bogs in the Dark Peak.

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FIELDWORK DOCUMENTS