Green Dark

Moonlight allows me to slow down and experience the fragile beat of plant life and the landscape that contains it. “Green Dark” is an attempt to translate my experiences in and around the Elan and Claerwen Valleys near Rhayader, Mid Wales, Great Britain, into images. I wish for these photos to be a voice for plant life and amplify its beat since it cannot do so itself, in that it is ‘un-asking’. I am guided by the sacred diversity of animal life which is sustained by plant life and in danger of being lost.

The same landscape contains and sustains a unique and historic community of people, whose open hill farming practices, from tenanted farms, root them through their ancestors with continued belonging. “Green Dark” offers a space – neither darkness nor light – to examine plant and human life, and the transition between them, in the discomfort of an uncertain climate future.

The Elan Valley was flooded over hundred years ago, and the neighbouring Claerwen Valley over fifty years ago, to supply Birmingham in England with water. The area is designated as an International Dark Sky Park.

The tenant farmers of the Elan and Claerwen Valleys keep sheep on the open hill without fences, as their ancestors have done for generations. They gather sheep together with their neighbours, sometimes still on horseback, forming a close community and passing down a traditional way of life. Agricultural policy change, and increasing economic and environmental concerns, including biodiversity loss and climate crisis, are creating uncertainty for the future upland farmer. The members of this community starting their working lives face great changes. Significantly, there are several young women in the new generation.

Zillah Bowes was selected as an inspiration for “Quiet Hours: Nighttime & Grief”, our Pulse exhibition open call.