These collage works are a depiction and illustration of English Heritage. Our civilisation, sophistication and pioneering - and ultimately our consumption and destruction of the land shown through the metaphor of broken aircraft, engine and propeller, juxtaposed with a romantic, but tainted vision of ‘OUR ENGLAND.’
Underpinned by the film of the same title by Shane Meadows, these works speak not of any Nationalist hatred of ‘Foreign Bodies,’ but identify with an anger of the loss of a ‘countries childhood.’ An idyllic, beautiful land found only in the Cinema, films that project an essence of what it is to be British, an indigenous spirit we want to believe in and hold true, but know deep down can’t ever really exist.
Huge cameras survey the land and the workers; aircraft becomes shell, junk, relic, form, helter-skelter and fairground attraction. We see a view of 1960’s Whitstable. Strolls along the promenade at Herne Bay with Doris, Mum and Mildred and the rolling farmland and livestock towered over by dark and ominous forms. Children in their innocence mangling the cattle for food for the engineers and physicists, whilst behind them stand the very rockets built to protect them.
In particular, a post-war family photograph taken at Ramsgate in 1952 shows the proud parents of their angry young son, the cross of the ‘skinhead’ already tattooed on his forehead - whilst above them, a symbol of British engineering reduced to a plastic model suspended from the ceiling.
These images are tranquil, desperate, loving and angry at a nation grown soft where parents cannot reprimand their children for fear of prosecution. They speak of a green land made only grey; the notion of ‘1984’ even more prevalent as we charge towards an uncertain future.
Mark S. Masters - December 2011