Over the last couple of years Hackney Marshes have became an important place for me. I have been living in London for five years, and although I greatly enjoy the metropolis it is at the same exhausting. Within certain limits the wild landscape of the marshes provides an escape from that. This is the third project I've done in the marshes since I have visited them for the first time two years ago.
When I visited the marshes for the first time they appeared to me as a wild floodland which was on all sides surrounded and pressed by man-made landscape. When I looked into that further, I learnt that there was very little true wilderness in the marshes. Most of the old trees were planted in the XIXth century, the ground was filled with rubble after the 2nd World War and the floodlands are subject to constant conservation and maintenance.
According to dialectics, as understood by Karl Marx, contradictions are inherent in real-world processes. Rather than being resolved in logically consistent manner, they are internalised and this is how those processes develop. I believe this is how we can look at what's going on in the marshes. For example, it is not possible to answer if conservation is a way of preserving the natural environment against destruction by industry and of the human factors; or if it's creation of idealised version of the nature for human use.
Appearances may conceal things from us. It may not be obvious at the first sight that for some time every year cattle is brought in to graze on the marshes to create specific conditions that are considered 'natural'. I mentioned that 'the wild landscape provides an escape' form the city living. This statement depends on the same contradiction of natural versus man-made that I went on to criticise later. Maybe I was looking for some romanticised ideal that never existed in the first place? It is when we ask questions like this, that the things get interesting.