Extraction and submersion, surface and depth. Using photographic practice to explore literary and folkloric imaginings of post-industrial landscape.

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This project is a crea>ve and cri>cal enquiry into the buried and submerged post-industrial landscapes ofMid-Wales and the West Midlands, linked through the wri>ngs of author Francis BreF Young (1884-1954). Driven by a concern with the now inaccessible landscape, submerged by water in reservoir sites inthe Welsh areas of Vyrnwy, Tryweryn and Elan, buried through in-fill in mines in Dudley, the enquiry willexplore how their histories and absences are made visible, traversing these con>ngent landscapesthrough archival research, literary and folkloric inves>ga>on, and photographic prac>ce.Francis BreF Young wrote a series of 'Mercian' novels set along the aqueduct route from the Elan Valleyto Birmingham, having witnessed the vast work in progress as a child, with fic>onalised accounts of thedam build in two novels (Young & Young, 1913, Young 1932). The Elan reservoirs made by theBirmingham Corpora>on, 1893-1904, evidence one of many instances of water collec>on in Wales byEnglish ci>es, from the 1890s through to the controversial compulsory flooding of Tryweryn in the 1960s.Each instance of flooding led to the displacement of communi>es and fundamental changes to thelandscape, offering an enquiry into the rela>onship between capitalist produc>on and picturesque andsublime landscape. Young's novels are notable in their evoca>ve and specific landscapes, a non-humanperspec>ve opening an understanding of the post-human landscape (McCully, 1996). Young's asser>onthat the building of the reservoir creates a doubling of the natural beauty of the landscape, in themirrored expanse of surface water, highlights the complexi>es of meaning in a technologically producedshi]ing landscape, now tourist site, whose ends and beginnings point to our current ecological crisis.Whilst there has been some enquiry into the geographies of his Black Country novels (Jay, 1975) and ashort chapter on the haunted landscapes of Undergrowth and others (Valen>ne, 2017), these lack closereading, with no geographic inves>ga>on into the dam novels, which provide a rich basis for place-basedenquiry.