Vernal Wood

04:25

4K video

2020

On a family walking holiday, the hyperstitional project of poetic nationalism at the heart of the English Lake District unravels, and the artifice of the nature here is revealed as the second nature of ingrained customs and habits.

Affection and irreverence, radicalism and romanticism, coalesce as the work attempts to intervene in the circulation of images central to the passing down of this restrictive ‘national commonwealth’; a tourist’s car burns outside Wordsworth’s gravestone, a military helicopter flies over Lake Windermere, and the bleakness of a rewinding project rupture the heritage image cycle, and offer glimpses of another Lake District.