2009 Camberwell Degree Show - Gallery view

These are photographs of my final degree show piece 'Managed Retreat' in-situ in the gallery space.

2009 'Managed Retreat' (Split Screen video installation)

“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (Gaston Bachelard).


This film installation ‘Managed Retreat’, continues my work exploring themes of fragility and structure in the context of notions of home.

The film focuses on a small community called Easton Bavents. Once the most easterly point of England, this stretch of Suffolk coastline is subject to one of the fastest rates of coastal erosion in the country. 14 houses in this small hamlet have been lost to the sea since the war. 14 are left. ‘Managed Retreat’ is the government policy for areas like this, deemed not valuable enough to protect with public funding.

The stories of the residents reflect a range of responses to living on the edge. Some people are resigned to the inevitability of losing their houses; others don’t think it will happen in their lifetime. One old man is fighting to build his own sea defences to take on the encroaching tide.

The film shows across two screens (echoing the fragmented perspectives), and is projected within a beach hut structure. “The hut appears to be the tap-root of the function of inhabiting” wrote Bachelard, and the way in which beach huts are individualized (with names, stripes, balconies & fretwork) reflects our instinct to reproduce idealistic notions of home in even the simplest structures (“architecture without utopia is impossible” said Thomas Demand).

The work seeks to question our assumptions about the stability of structures in our lives, and how we deal with the unpredictable. By drawing attention to a community that is navigating a continually changing boundary, the film challenges notions of stability usually associated with the concept of home. This post-structuralist approach focuses attention on the precariousness and fragility of places that we think of as certain (‘safe as houses’), and encourages the audience to read this as a metaphor for ways in which other structures that surround us may not be as fixed as we like to believe (like capitalism, gender, language, time).

A sense of time, entropy and loss pervades the work, and yet the nature of capturing the landscape and stories on film, is itself an act of preservation. The long (almost still) landscape shots in the work both reflect the passing of time and yet also attempt to fix and hold onto something that is constantly changing, much as landscape painters have always tried to do. The land itself may not be deemed valuable but making a film implies we should consider how to define value.

Whiteread’s dolls houses, Parker’s exploded shed and Emin’s beach hut have all been influential in the way in which they explore the potency of primitive fragile structures. The influence of Tacita Dean can be seen in the attempt to reflect both stillness and movement in relation to time; as can Lindsay Seers’ installations in thinking about the relationship between documentary and narrative; while Anya Gallaccio and Robert Smithson’s themes of entropy and their challenges to notions of preservation reverberate throughout.