LOST

Melissa Hird

During the recent pandemic, I would often take my daily walks near the reservoir at Thruscross— it was here I discovered the ruins of a submerged village, and I was swiftly taken aback by the memories that might have been lost. The village I refer to here is the flooded and demolished Yorkshire village of West End. The physical space disappeared in the submersion of the village in 1966, and the creation of the reservoir at Thruscross; an act which ravaged the physical community, but not the stories and memories that persist. It is this that I have tried to represent by capturing the landscape of the area and linking it to the stories of the community. Bringing new attention to a supposedly ‘lost’ area portrays the timelessness of community and monumentalizes this crucial unit of humanity—the people you run into in the village, the streets and fields siblings and friends played on, church graveyards..that human connection tied to the town and land.

Website | Instagram | Email