I have recently been in, been-with, the landscape through the experience of working on this series of drawings, on location, beneath the remains of a once-laid beech hedge. That laid hedge, now grown out, its stock-proof boundary-making function replaced with wire fencing, is a marker between public and private land. I place myself in the public Byway 745 that runs below the ancient hedge.
It is part of my project Byway 745 Observatory to record this location through drawing as well as photography, video and collecting. The physicality of the drawing process is invigorating. Each drawing on white cartridge paper measures 59 x 84 cm and is made with graphite and wash. Perching for over an hour at a time, leaning against the muddy bank with a large drawing board balanced on one’s knees, is to feel the urgency to capture the information as economically as possible before the body can’t stand the aches and pains any longer. The challenge is totally absorbing and during the time spent drawing the smells and sounds of the place become familiar in a way they do not when one simply passes through.
The intervention of humans with these trees, the cutting and bending over of their branches in the past has made for their gnarled, knotted appearance and the horizontal emphasis of the exposed roots. This is accentuated by the erosion of the chalk bank over the years due to the hollowing out of the lane below by the passage of human traffic. Currently the series consists of five drawings but I am aiming for ten to make a bank of images to curate alongside other works from the Observatory.
Seeing the drawings together throws up connections to the human body through the limb-like roots and protrusions. There is an anthropomorphism present in the work which I have also begun to notice in my photographs of the rutted and eroded chalk of the track below these trees. This is something I am exploring further, aware of the metaphor of landscape as body, and a vulnerable one at that.
Drawings by Liz Clifford.
Liz Clifford 
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