Slow Forgetting

Along the shifting edge of land and sea, the remnants of wartime coastal defences are slowly being absorbed into the landscape. The form remains, but the purpose fades, redrawn by time and tide, sand and vegetation.

As these structures weather and slowly disappear, so too do the living memories of the time in which they were built and used. With each passing generation, their significance and purpose become more distant, and the thoughts, memories and emotions associated with them begin to fade.

Yet something remains. It feels as though the concrete itself has absorbed something of what has taken place around it. Like cathedral steps worn smooth by centuries of passing feet, these structures are tangible links to the past, holding traces of lives, experiences and histories that can no longer be directly recalled.

Now many stand among reeds and rushes, at the water’s edge, or partly submerged by the shifting coast. Once built to hold their ground, the ground now holds and transforms them.  They are becoming landmarks of a different kind, gradually absorbed in the landscape they were intended to defend.

Increasingly mysterious, they exist somewhere between structure and landscape, memory and forgetting. What once stood firm is softened and reshaped, a memory pressed into the land.

A slow forgetting.