07. Roger Coleman: Flat Earth 2007

29th March - 12th May 2007

EXHIBIT is pleased to welcome Roger Coleman’s photographic installation Flat Earth 2007 as the seventh Empty Space Projects. Roger Coleman’s thought-provoking and beautiful photographic work raises questions about the impact of urban values on rural environments. The year 2007 will see the global urban population overtake the rural population and complete the evolutionary step from hunter gatherer to urban consumer: from Homo Sapiens to Homo Urbanis. One hundred and fifty years ago Britain embraced urban dwelling in a way that much of the world is only just beginning to catch up with. This change has shaped our rural landscape to the needs of city dwellers. The result is a radically transformed landscape, which is the focus of Roger Coleman’s photographic installation Flat Earth 2007.

28 images closely hung around four walls and against a dark background take the viewer into another world, very different to this Central
London venue. The second in a series of explorations of the Cambridgeshire Fens, the works highlight the impact of urban demands on what was once a wetland of marshes and shallow meres, and is now perhaps the most productive and intensively farmed area in the UK. This contemporary working landscape has been shaped by cities and supermarkets, but there has been little debate about why it should be as it is, who should take responsibility for it, and how we can relate to it. What is clear is that in the future the global landscape will be shaped, just as radically by the demands of urban populations that neither understand nor care for the countryside.

Coleman’s work focuses on these shifts by documenting the landscape of the Cambridgeshire Fens, where he lives. Not as a statement, but as a record and also an attempt to find a new, unromantic aesthetic in the modern landscape as it really is.

Roger states about his work:

‘One of the things that binds me to the Fens, is that as drained land it is so completely constructed and artificial, yet constantly changing with the weather and the seasons and the crops. Drawing and photographing it is, for me, a way of trying to nail down this conflict between the human and the natural.’

Roger Coleman

Image below: Flat Earth 2007 Limited Publication. £10 + Postage