A chapter by Sophie Warren & Jonathan Mosley in Ben Stringer (ed.) (2018) Rurality Re-imagined: Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers and Wild Things (ORO Editions, California). In 2000 we completed a project exploring motorway travel and motorway environments in the UK. The project resulted in a body of work including moving and still imagery and installations exhibited at Prema, Gloucestershire; Gasworks, London; Fredereike Taylor Gallery and The Armory Show, New York. This short essay is a recollection and reflection on the experience of researching for the project and of selected completed works. An extract:
‘We are driving every day. Acceleration, speed, passing landscape, de-acceleration, motorway services, acceleration, speed, passing landscape … Motorway services are serial repetitions of architecture that create intervals of time on the journey. They break the smooth, engineered space of the motorway and the internal car environment. They are markers in the act of travelling but not of place. Their location is not related to a landscape but to a network. Our experience of them is not positioned within the network but within our journey. They oscillate around our needs, either too close or too far, until they are “the next one.”’