These decaying industrial remnants morphing into the muddy shores of the Hoo Peninsula exemplify Georg Simmel’s concept of ruins as the shifting equilibrium between the feats of humankind and the forces of nature. Constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to extract the rich clay for brickmaking, or to install an industrial infrastructure on this boggy land, a centenary or so later they are sinking into it, the means of extraction subsumed into the material that it was originally designed to exploit.

The forensically accurate photography in each of these tableau presents the layers of history exposed within the landscape. These sediments bear reference to Fernand Braudel’s three distinct temporal modes. The blue gault clays are aspects of Braudel’s ‘geographical time’, while the remains of the sailing barges testify to the ‘social time’ of human cultures. Lastly, in the keenly observed here and now of the large format photography, the dynamic of the draining ooze is held in an ongoing arrest of time, the breath of personal presence implicit in the vivid immediacy of what the viewer beholds.