Visualising Entropic Narratives of Deep-Time: A presentation of fieldwork from the Broads
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-05-10

Funded by the Broads Landscape Partnership Scheme and the National Lottery Heritage Fund,myself and three colleagues at Norwich University of the Arts are currently contributing to a cross-disciplinary research initiative. Titled Mapping The Broads, the initiative aims to diversify and strengthen public engagement with the national park.

Capturing visual traces of entropy in the Broads landscape takes the eye to edges. Crumbling edges of banks, eddies of sand under the lips of lapping water, surface currents, piped torrents, submerged foliage, pools brimming with eutrophic matter. Geo stories are epic tales to human eyes, time runs differently here. It is slow, slower than slow, but micro movements hint at the macro epic as it unfolds.
Benjamin writes; the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly, indefinitely and weightily, in the same way as the weight of his net tells a fisherman about his catch (Benjamin, 1999). Materiality acts as a surfacer of memory, and simultaneously a revealer of entropic journeys. By reading this we can consider the past and the future in the present second of time. Illustration can allow us to time travel both back and forth in the same space. To consider time beyond our ourselves and our own comprehension of human life. Materials of the landscape present themselves as a combination of matter and form. The form is effected by entropic pressures. This is where the narrative starts to present itself, through tacit associations the materials impart their stories.
References:
Benjamin, W.(1999). Illuminations. New Ed. edition. London: Pimlico.

Sinead Evans, Norwich University of the Arts