Fields of Light

Documenting the changing Lincolnshire Landscape, threatened by a race to Net-Zero.

is a practice-led research project that interrogates the complex land-use conflict unfolding in Lincolnshire, a county long defined as "England's breadbasket."

This landscape is now the fulcrum for a disproportionate concentration of renewable energy proposals. The cumulative total of these solar sites now exceeds 34,000 acres, an area larger than the city of Lincoln. This is not marginal land; the vast majority of proposals target Best and Most Versatile (BMV) agricultural land (Grades 1, 2, and 3a), highlighting a critical tension within national planning policy.

As these developments are fast-tracked as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs), they effectively bypass local democratic oversight, raising critical questions about national food security and political ecology. This project seeks to document and interrogate the human and environmental costs of this policy, capturing a rural community and its landscape in a liminal state, poised for irreversible change.

The Material Praxis: Glass and Light

The project's conceptual framework is grounded in its materiality. The methodology employs the cyanotype process, a 19th-century iron-based technique. This choice is deliberate, as the process is contingent on UV light, establishing a direct indexical link to the project's subject: solar energy.

The substrate, glass, is equally significant. It functions as a direct material metaphor for the glass and silicon of the solar panels themselves.

Through this praxis, the organic, living landscape is translated and fixed onto the very industrial substrate that threatens its erasure. This act of translation freezes a dynamic, productive landscape into a fragile, static artefact. This material transformation mirrors the land's own proposed conversion: from a site of biological harvest to a static industrial 'plant' for energy generation. The praxis thus becomes self-reflexive: the sun's own energy is harnessed to create a work that critically interrogates its industrial exploitation.