Early morning walks allow Andy Puncher to tune in to the changing colours and textures of the Kent countryside and provide a much-needed respite from Zoom.
For 20 years I have enjoyed the balance of living in rural Kent while spending weekdays working in a busy and vibrant east London studio, adopting two separate lives and personas. Lockdown changed this overnight, forcing the merger of my two worlds into one seemingly endless Zoom call and an agoraphobic reaction of not wanting to leave my desk for fear of missing an opportunity to return to the mourned “normal”.
I realised that, in order to rebalance my deteriorating mental health, I needed to establish some distance within the blur and began early morning walks, which have continued as a daily ritual throughout lockdown.
The work of our practice has always been based around the integration of natural landscaping into the urban environment, with shared space providing the conditions for both communities and biodiversity to grow and flourish within a seasonally changing materiality. Through the regularity of the walks I have found myself tuning further into the daily micro changes in the landscape, the variety of tone under continually morphing light and, perhaps echoing my mood, the changing colours and textures of regrowth.
The hop gardens that fall on the intersection of the majority of my walks have become a focus of this as I have watched the poles host the planting, growing and harvesting of the hops, and which now stand, like the country, keenly waiting for life to return.
