June 2010 – Philippe Wrigley announced as winner of thenetwerk® award 2011

Philippe’s proposal

My project has been inspired by the continual change of the rural landscape to accommodate commercial and industrial structures, which have been so quickly adopted by the local community as landmarks. We travel through rural landscapes that are broken by these mundane structures without a second thought for the bridges, water and telecommunication towers, wind turbines, pylons, industrial or commercial plants. These functional items, a necessity of our modern lifestyle, offer a strange contradiction: once communities emphatically rejected these structures, now they are adopted as local landmarks.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson made the reference that the word “landscape” was originally used to describe a composition of man-made spaces on the land, that it is a mistake to think of a landscape as something apart from human society: a landscape is always a synthetic space, “system of space superimposed on the face of the land… to serve the community.”

I will investigate Guy Debord’s theory on psycho-geography and consider whether it can be applied in a rural context with similar affects of urban environment.  The Dérive, an awareness of characteristic changes as moving through various different areas, is about the interaction of the environmental effects on the local communities.

My intention is to explore and research various structures such as a radio or TV mast when lit up in the evening with its red lights against darkened blue sky, or the wind turbines in the mists, or the strong evening sun that highlights a water tower. The effect is to capture the aesthetical beauty to emphasise the paradox of its existence within the context of its environment.  Although this may well be seen as a visual cliché, the beauty and the beast, I hope to stimulate certain awareness about our lifestyle today as an inherent mark on our landscapes.