Faultlines - Special Edition

The contested lands shown in Faultlines are mainly situated in the North-West and North-East of England with some running along coastal areas of the South. These regions were under threat from shale gas exploration and extraction, licensed by the UK Oil and Gas Authority, using the method of hydraulic fracturing known as ‘fracking.’ The ongoing need to balance the energy security of the nation with the environmental concerns of climate change, industrialisation of the countryside, pollution, and biodiversity, rendered the debate around fracking highly contentious.

‘The natural gas drilled for in fracking is part of an ancient story; it is a story of rocks older than the British Isles, but it is also a tale of the people whose lives have been shaped by their struggle to stop the drilling for the gas.’ - Helen Baczkowska, Ecologist and writer from the book’s essay

The black and white photographs in the book depict the myriad of details in the landscapes—the textures of grass and rocky outlets, fungi emerging from a bed of leaves, stretches of water interspersed by plants, beds of ferns and natural cracks and faultlines running through the earth. The images are far removed from the clinical grid references identifying their location using the Ordinance Survey (OS) mapping service. Volynchook’s photographs make evident the disconnect between administrative blocks of land valued for fracking potential, and the great diversity and beauty inherent in the landscape.

‘The rocks containing the gas are sedimentary shales, formed from older stone weathered and washed into oceans, lakes or swamps; the silt and clay drifted down to a patchy, irregular settling over thousands of years, trapping gases in the faults or flaws and the hollows. Millennia of slumbering followed, sediment compressed by the sediment above, the weight causing lithification, the alchemy of soft deposits turning to rock. Shales can span many ages: north of York and in southern Scotland they are Carboniferous, around three hundred million years old, the same age as most coal seams. These seams too hold natural gas, once a danger to colliers, but now also sought out and drilled. In Sussex, the shales of the Weald date from the Jurassic, around one hundred and fifty million years ago; a time when Stegosaur and Diplodocus moved through forests of ferns, while warm seas spiralled with ammonites.’ - Helen Baczkowska