These photographs chart the emergence of the gridded agricultural landscape in the Canadian Shield in North-Western Canada. The Canadian Shield is an almost flat area of glaciated Precambrian rock, punctuated with lakes and swamps. The soil is too thin to support agriculture, which can only become viable on the edges, and forests are sporadic. As the Shield transitions to prairie, the gridded agricultural landscape transitions from being islands in a sea of rock to a gridded sea containing the remnants of rocky islands. These patches of gridded agricultural landscape embody and represent the emergence of civilisation itself.
Shot on Kodachrome 25.
thomas
deckker
architect
