‘Corrupted landscapes:’ Norwich artist depicts the changes in Norfolk’s countryside at local exhibition

Those who live in the Norfolk countryside and small villages know how much the landscape has changed over the past few decades.

As towns have grown in size and roads have brought more people and traffic to rural areas in East Anglia, artist Adam King has been acutely aware of the changes.

His current art exhibition at the Tea Lounge in Norwich, aptly named 'Roundabout the Edge of the World,' examines how the urban world has slowly bled into the pastoral one.

'I was fascinated by this idea of 'corrupted landscapes,' an intersection between the pastoral environment and new development.

'I lived in the countryside and seeing these building projects going on - these small towns swelling into cities, new roads and cars going through the village - I wanted to explore that. It's kind of a dislocated tussle, a storm, going on between these two elements,' he said.

Mr King moved away from Norwich when he was 21 and recently moved back this year. He received an MA in drawing at Wimbledon College of Arts and lived in London, but eventually felt a pull back to Norfolk.

When he arrived back to his home town, he realised the drastic differences in landscape. His cycling rides through the countryside also allowed him to notice small details about the environment that would be otherwise overlooked, including the cars whizzing past, the roadkill.

Mr King's art is an innovative use of materials; layers of linocut mounted on foam board are used to create a three-dimensional final product. Years ago, he cut up luxury magazines to make collages of pastoral landscapes. The effect of both mediums is to show how much the commercial and technological worlds affect our lives.

'I wanted the work to be timely, I've never known anything like this. These are amazing changes and we're bearing witness to it. Now we look at everything through screens, either phones or computers or even the windows of a car, and it's all become quite fractured. Our lives are mediated through the architecture of screens, and I wanted my work to reflect that and the way we look at nature,' he said.

Though in a way his art serves as a kind of social commentary, Mr King says he merely wanted to reflect the environment he saw around him: both the positive and negative components.

'I'm quite ambivalent about it, all the new developments. On one hand, it's about the idea that everything changes. You have this sense of ownership of the landscape, but other people come in and have that same idea of ownership.

'There's also a sense of things lost - you can't help but think you're losing something,' he said.

Mr King's exhibition will last until January 5, 2017.