Drains, Cables, and Cuts is a photographic/video installation by Annabel Howland comprising the artist’s signature cut-out images, a series of related landscape photographs and, a first for the artist, a digitally animated film: Cut Drains, Charts, Creeks and Cuts. The focus of the project is the landscape of the East Anglian Fenland, rendered through the lens of a camera or a series of highly tactile cartographic abstractions as a complex network of lines. From the ground, the flatness of the Fens makes everything appear in relation to a vanishing point or an ever-present horizon line. From the air this unique landscape reveals itself as an intricate, evocative space of overlapping lines and contours. The paths of old watercourses visible in the soil diverge from their contemporary counterparts or converge with other features, such as physical or administrative boundaries. The first staging of Drains, Cables, and Cuts received additional support from the Mondriaan Foundation and the Fonds voor BKVB.
