The Ecchoing Green
My home village of Felpham, in West Sussex, was also home to William Blake during the years 1800 to 1803.
By pairing photographs of the 21st century village landscape with texts by William Blake, I invite viewers to reflect on what has changed – and what has not – since the time of Blake. Blake’s writings fiercely critiqued the social exploitation, racism and inequality that marked the emergent nineteenth century. Whilst some improvements have undoubtedly been made, many of the same social problems still remain with us, two hundred years on. By focusing my pictures on scenes that look superficially very similar to what Blake’s eyes would have seen, I attempt to use a visual rhetoric that reflects on this idea of plus ca change. .
Footnote: The curious spelling of “Ecchoing” is William Blake’s. I love the repeated “c”; an echo within the word, a sort of textual onomatopoeia. A word that captures my desire to reverberate Blake’s writing from the past, in my pictures of the present.
Shakespeare’s Fairies also are the rulers of the vegetable world, and so are Chaucer’s;
let them be so considered, and then the poet will be understood
When my mother died I was very young
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry, weep weep, weep weep.
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
Shadows of men in fleeting bands upon the winds:
Divide the heavens of Europe
Now there’s a story come into my head,
that I will tell your honour, if you’ll give me leave
Sit down, and in our mossy vallies, on some bank beside a river clear,
Throw thy silk draperies off, and rush into the stream
And as a sea o’erwhelms a land in the day of an earthquake;
Fury, rage, madness, in a wind swept through America
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here?
So speaking she sat down on Sussex shore
singing lulling cadences & playing in sweet intoxication
Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates …
Voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard
and their forms more distinctly seen
Such were the joys, When we all girls & boys
In our youth-time were seen
On the Ecchoing Green.