edgelands

I am currently reading Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts book Edgelands, its a wonderful poetic book, which explores the edginess of these places. There is nothing nostalgic about edgelands, they are the soft verges strewn with discarded litter along the motorway, the places that appear to belong to nobody. Farley and Symmons really challenge the question of the slippage between rural and urban, finding the lyrical in these landscapes, the motorway hotels, service stations and derelict farms. These areas of land are nameless they are the place on the way to Ikea, to the business park, this terrain, is visible and invisible, they are unlikely to be managed and have a nameless wildness about them. There are 30-40 thousand hectares of these areas, which we shoot through without as much as a second glance.