Introduction
The title of the series admits to diverse possible readings: the unfolding development and repeating of history, the teaching of history or history’s playing field.
In The Course of History, I set out to portray the once blood soaked sites of Europe’s former battlefields from Troy until the end of the Second World War, not by showing the obvious scars (if any) or monuments and memorials or war cemeteries but by portraying happenstance marks or subtle features that allude to a violent past and evoke collective memory within the sublime and pastoral character of landscape.
The natural world is both one of beauty and of violence or cruelty, both always there and existing in each other's shadows; or, to borrow the American earth artist Robert Smithson’s words: ‘each landscape, no matter how calm and lovely, conceals a substrata of disaster.’
The series originated in my growing concern about the G W Bush Administration's actions and policies in its first year.