FALLEN | NICHOLAS HOLT
22-25 FEB 2024 | 10AM - 5PM | VICTORIA HALL | FREE
Exploring the strange beauty of the Dark Peak’s aircraft crash sites.
The moors of the Dark Peak are one of England’s most forbidding and mysterious landscapes. A terrain at once strange and familiar; burned into our psyche through literature and history. An area of great natural beauty where walkers wander the hills, perhaps noticing a pile of molten aluminium lying just off the path, or the glint of a cross placed on a hillside. For the moors can be just as disorientating to the pilot as the walker. It is these easily overlooked remains to which Nicholas Holt brings to our attention in this body of work. Fallen examines the traces of aviation incidents that lie scattered across the moors of the Peak District National Park. Over one hundred aircraft have succumbed to this cloud-concealed and brooding terrain, many during the World War Two era.
Many of the crash sites are still scattered with debris that has been left to corrode amongst the heather, rocks and peat bogs where they fell. Other fragments have been gathered together to form makeshift memorials; often poignantly decorated with crosses and poppies. For behind the wreckage lie human stories of tragedies and lucky escapes of aircrew returning from missions or on training flights. The complete series comprises seventeen photographs, each depicting the location of an aviation incident; an otherworldly crater left by a V1 flying bomb; the wreckage of a flying fortress lying in an icy landscape; the fragments of a Meteor jet lying forgotten in the woods. Fallen explores the beauty and unease of places that have been altered by traumatic events, each site and fragment reconnecting us to a moment in the past.
In making this work, Nicholas Holt was inspired by the Brueghel painting ‘Landscape with The Fall of Icarus’ (c. 1555). Which has been described as a ‘parable on human aspiration’. These sites represent an intersection of history and tragedy with the geography of the Dark Peak. They also touch on the complexity of human intertwinement with nature – showing the wreckage as both an imposter and as part of the wild landscape. For months Nicholas Holt researched and walked the moors searching for the exact locations of these sites. At even the most remote locations he found a some kind of marker; a wooden cross; a poppy wired to a wing; a plaque or a flag to mark the loss of a human life. Revealing the great lengths that the British people will go to commemorate the fallen on the this forbidding moorland.