Sometimes fire is not the answer

On a beautiful sunny early-Spring day I walked the farmland behind Camber Sands in East Sussex. The crack and report of a shotgun lifted and turned my head by instinct, and I saw a bird fall from the sky.

This profoundly sad and surreal sight was one I had never experienced before. To know how a bird or any other natural flying thing moves, well, it fits your psyche it feels so natural and effortless. You know to predict a certain amount of duck and dive, a shear and a veer, and always eventually a landing of some kind. You also know that it will move unpredictably but always beautifully. To witness a bird drop seemingly directly plumb-line to the mud and stubble created a momentary chaos in my brain because of the absolute evidence that something was so wrong. Even a peregrine has a some sort of structure to its stoop.

I experienced a sparrow-hawk gracefully killing something a mere fifteen minutes later on the same stretch of Romney Marsh, but that did not feel jarring at all. It felt necessary: an expression of a form of perfect natural order. The hawk smashed its prey and carried it in a decaying but controlled arc behind a hedge. The shotgun just ended a form of grace, and left only gravity.

In ‘Let go’ I wondered what it would take for age-old entrenched mentalities to change and crack out of a cycle where powerful people make the same mistakes ad nauseam. I imagined a conflagration taking apart a symbolic centre of old power and forcing change. In this work I reflected on the snatched and snuffed beauty. I also double-take at myself and remember that fire, gunfire or managed grouse-moor burning, are the antithesis of what we need to allow in order to save as much of the world as we possibly can, and maintain some beauty.