Northern Distributor (2016-18)

Early in 2016, work began on the construction of Norwich’s Northern Distributor Road (NDR). It was acknowledged that this questionable development would have “large adverse” impacts on protected species including barn owls and bats, as well as an adverse impact on the landscape, and from the outset it involved the destruction of thousands of mature trees along its short route. Recent work in biosemiotics proposes that landscapes should be understood primarily as sites of meaning, and the term semiocide was coined to describe the destruction of such sites, where “the rich signscape of nature is replaced by something much poorer.” These images explore a kind of parodic pictorial representation of this instance of semiocide.