East Gallery, Norwich
14/3/2025 - 7/6/2025
An exhibition that looks at the relationship between offshore wind energy and Doggerland, the submerged landmass that used to connect the UK to mainland Europe.
Fully submerged around 8000 years ago, Doggerland was a place of human inhabitation and settlement. It is an area now understood through proxies: through seabed scanning and filming, sediment sampling, the finding or trawling of artefact. Offshore wind turbines are literally embedded in the same Doggerland earth – massive swathes of data arrive from scans taken for undersea cable routes that transfer energy from offshore wind farms in the middle of the North Sea to the shore.
Presenting a mix of collected and adapted material from marine archaeological research and wind energy construction, The New Scroby Sands Offshore Wind Farm Information Centre positions the North Sea as a discursive site, informed by a looping, cyclical time; a nonlinear poetics of the sea.
Within the exhibition sit sections of wind turbine blades of two different, composite designs; fired 20,000-30,000 year old sediment sourced from the seabed by the Doggerland research project ‘Europe’s Lost Frontiers’; a perforated metal floor reflecting the nodal, or neuron-like connections between turbines in specific offshore North Sea wind farms; prints akin to information boards, audio, and films combine recordings and imagery sourced throughout the fellowship from across the Norfolk Broads, the wider UK and the North Sea, and include infrastructural sites, sediment analysis, and punctuations of the occasional animated fiction.
Read the full text here.
View the gallery plan here.
Photographs: Denisa Ilie