James A Holliday

Through the Strata is an examination of three materials of landscape: water, sound and air. The writing situates itself between fact and fiction, at times imagining what a place could be doing rather than what it is doing.

Using artworks and prose by others to point me towards locations such as Denge, on the south coast of England, where concrete sound mirrors are sinking into the land; Canadian villages, just visible through the water, which were flooded by the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the revolving restaurants above Toronto and Berlin that are part of telecommunication networks. I journeyed through these layers, wanting to understand their physicality. So often when visiting a place, it remains shapeless as we travel in cars, buses or on trains, looking inwards rather than out. By not connecting our bodies to the landscape, we miss its contours. As I moved through and sometimes above these landscapes I began to associate places with textures and atmospheres.