julian rowe
julian rowe
visual artist
visual artist
...ends of the earth
In September 2002, in a rather unplanned way, I visited Orfordness in Suffolk; just two or three days after that I made a trip to
County Clare in the West of Ireland. Whilst in Ireland I explored several early monastic sites, including those on the island of Inishmore.
The short space of time that had elapsed between the two visits made them seem like the beginning and end of a single journey, and
the two places, one in the most easterly part of the British Isles, the other in the farthest west, represented extremes in other
ways. The Irish monasteries had once preserved a vestige of learning and literacy when the West had fallen into barbarism, and it
was through their missionaries that the arts of civilisation were revived in Northern Europe; by contrast the atomic weapons testing
laboratories at Orfordness represent the potential for a new dark age. The primitive little stone buildings and the sinister concrete
bunkers in one sense represent opposite ends of an era of human history; in another sense they are both remnants of times when the
very survival of Western culture has been in question.
This train of thought led me to embark on a project to develop these ideas
further. I have called the project Ends of the Earth. Its first manifestation has been as part of an experimental arts event at Hastings
Museum, during which I constructed two miniature landscapes in the gallery there. One of these, based on the limestone landscape of
County Clare, contained a Celtic monastery of around the 7th Century; the other set the two "pagodas" in a space reminiscent of the
shingle bank at Orfordness.
Ends of the Earth. 2003. Cast resin iron, clay, sand. Installation in Hastings Museum
