STANDALONE

STANDALONE is the rather apt name of the woodland area that has become the visual embodiment of my struggles with depression, anxiety, and avoidance. It is a place of contradiction, at once still and unchanging, yet capable of sudden, violent transformation. It offers refuge, its silent paths guiding me toward solitude. Yet within this sanctuary lies a persistent unease.

STANDALONE is a haunted landscape, steeped in memory. Once the site of an old drift mine, the woodland was largely felled during the Second World War and only replanted decades later in the 1970s. These layers of history, visible and invisible, infuse the space with a spectral quality, echoing the psychological terrain I navigate within it. STANDALONE draws on the work of Anne Whiston Spirn, in particular her book ‘The Language of Landscape’.