On Tuesday August 24 1824 the artist John Constable took his ailing wife Maria up on to the South Downs at Devil’s Dyke in Sussex. He recorded the visit in a letter to his friend, John Fisher (Beckett, VI, p. 172), and in the course of his description he comments: “Last Tuesday, the illest day that ever was, we went to the Dyke – which is in fact a Roman remains of an embankment, overlooking – perhaps the most grand & affecting natural landscape in the world-and consequently a scene the most unfit for a picture.”
Constable seems to have made almost no work of Devil’s Dyke, there is just a drawing in London’s V&A Museum of the view looking inland over a hedge. Perhaps this was too well-trodden a beauty spot.
It was the Victorians who first turned Devil’s Dyke, the largest chalkland dry combe in Britain, into a place of beauty. They built a branch railway to transport sightseers from the nearby coastal resort of Brighton, as well as a steep cliff railway from the Dyke to the village of Poynings and a cable car across the dyke itself. In 1893 a crowd of 30,000 visited on Whit Monday. Besides the views, they enjoyed a fairground, two bandstands, and a camera obscura, considered to be one of the finest in England.
Taking Constable’s quote as a starting point, this work is an attempt to explore the limits of a photograph – in all its historic and contemporary forms – to capture the essence of a landscape and could therefore be described as an experiment in failure. The series utilises alternative photographic processes, traditional film and digital photography alongside generative Ai image capture methods.