GRAINLAND: despair with brio

 

GRAIN LAND 

 

In my mind I have returned many times this year.

 

Reed beds struggle to be heard above the wind. This is a landscape of horizontals, burnt umber, sepia, sap green, raw umber, pylon lines.

 

What’s here is old industry except for the Amazon distribution centre, the new kid, welcomed by the local council.

 

Big skies grey and steel blue and occasional bright sunlight shouldering its way through the cloud. Then it is pushed back.

 

This is also a landscape of verticals, pylons, silos, warehouses, floodlight towers, fence posts, and barbed wire, brambles that are nature’s barbed wire. Pylons, rank upon rank, soldiers, numbering off, on parade. 

 

 ‘Nothing save marshes, mud, water, purselane, sky, tufty saltings, glasswort, wrack and sheep.  But the chromatic and textural variations of sky, mud and water are infinite 

Jonathan Meads from Museum without Walls

 

Isle of Grain is on  the easternmost point of the Hoo Peninsula within the district of Medway in Kent. No longer an island and now forming part of the peninsula, the area is almost all marshland and is a major habitat for diverse wetland birds. Wikipedia

 

We visited the Isle of Grain in 2019 http://www.curiouscoast.co.uk/page-3/page-11/