Samuel Hanner

FEN is the project that has occupied my practice since December 2020 when, in my childhood bedroom, legs tired from a stomp across heavy clay Norfolk fields, I read of the wetlands that used to stretch across an area of East-Anglia not far from where I sat. Richly biodiverse fragments of an eco-system coalesced in my mind.

For the first video, I decided to explore the impossibility of accessing the lost landscape of Hereward’s resistance to the Norman invasion, through the available resources and places around me in South-East London. From a disused astro-turf pitch behind a supermarket grew the question of what kind of relationship this Hereward had formed with the landscape, based on the scant information recorded. Was there less of a separation between human and nature in their time? In what ways were they attuned to the idiosyncrasies of this lost landscape? And, specific to the facts about Hereward’s life, why did he vanish without a record after the fall of his stronghold? A narrative for my exploration of this character and their relationship with the Fens began to form.

The second strand that led into the following video considered how the landscape of the Fens will go on changing with the threat of rising seas and the eventual exhaustion of the peat rich agricultural land. How will our attitudes to the incoming waters shape the landscape just as Anglo-Saxon attitudes to landscape are reflected through the language.

This installation was the gateway to the FEN project. The medieval helmet is emblematic of an intangible world, a pre-modern mindset. Drawn to the surface of the helmet, the shine rendered in thick oil paint on the roughest Hessian, the presence of the void within the helmet seemed amplified. I wondered about the noise that had existed within. To form the scenario of a ritual organisation of collected materials, I conceived of this space as somewhere to contemplate the possibility of a lost, alternative engagement with landscape, the psyche and space-time.

My work has developed from the idea of mythopoesis, characterised in Fictioning by Simon O’Sullivan and David Burrows, as “productive of worlds, people and communities-to-come often drawing upon residual and emergent cultures”, towards a myth-science, which “functions by producing alternate perspectives and models, revealing habits of thought concerning physical historical and social realities as yet more myth”. I was especially drawn to the consideration of medieval Mappae Mundi as ““novel points of entry” into contemporary situations. For medieval maps, rather than being just representations of worlds, are sacred objects that guide or invite journeys.” P.113