MONUMENT TO THE VANQUISHED

MONUMENT TO THE VANQUISHED is a photo-essay telling the history of the enclosures, with images of folk traditions, activists, hand-painted portraits of commoners, constructed images, montages and large-form photographs to tell an oft-silenced story.

The enclosure acts describe the legal process through which common rights over land were terminated and the common land converted to the exclusive property and use of a landowner.

This project will consist of several distinct sections which will each tell a different aspect of the history and outcomes of the Enclosure Acts. Each part will adopt various forms and aesthetics, from portraiture, montage, constructed images, animation and film, to inform and illustrate numerous perspectives.

PART I | THE COMMONERS

For the PART I | THE COMMONERS we identified the small pockets of common land that still exist in Shropshire and photographed people who still had common rights there. They are a kind of snapshot back into the 17th century.

Around twenty portraits have been taken on an analogue medium-format camera with black-and-white film, and the subsequent prints hand-tinted using traditional photographic dyes. We used this process to imbue the landscapes, through colour, with a form of magical realism. This is to portray a more spiritual relationship with the land, the breaking of which Italian feminist historian, Silvia Federici, argues was central to the capitalist expansion and loss of the commons.

PART II | RURAL REBELS

PART II | RURAL REBELS looks at the history of protest against enclosure and other loss of rights. Such protests were usually small, local, and harshly punished by the courts, and they have largely been forgotten now.

These images are stylised photomontages depicting artefacts of peasant life, shown alongside representations of rural traditions, and objects relating to contemporary land struggles. The montages are exhibited with Gordon’s large-scale photographic portraits of UK folk traditions to show how these, often ancient, rituals have performed the boundaries, histories, and customs that mark our relationship to the land.

PART III | URBAN VAGABONDS

In PART III | URBAN VAGABONDS we will acknowledge the social outcome of the enclosures, which created a disenfranchised vagabond class divorced from the land and any means of subsistence.

It wants to draw parallels between the rural rebellions to the enclosure act, modes of collective resistance to Thatcher’s Britain in the techno-trance rave culture which led to the repressive 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, and the contemporary actions to protect public rights to roam. Images will be exhibited from Leah Gordon’s extensive archive of analogue photographic portraits taken in the early 1990s of new age travellers and later in the decade of anti-road protesters.

These will be presented alongside photographs shot on colour slide film on large format cameras of the isolated ruins of caravans in rural settings in Wales and the Welsh borders. The caravans symbolise an example of rebellion as exemplified by the stage set for character ‘Rooster’ in the renowned play ‘Jerusalem’.

We will employ the use of constructed images which are inspired and informed by the 18th century book of illustrations by John Thomas Smith (a friend and contemporary of William Blake) in ‘Vagabondiana, to further explore the reality for disenfranchised peasants after the enclosures.