David Eckersley’s exhibition Acting in the Middle: A Glossary of Encounter is a deep dive into the layered histories and fragile ecosystems of the North Derbyshire peatlands. Research began in 2022, when Eckersley moved to Sheffield and started exploring Kinder Scout — ‘moon‑like, other‑worldly, like no landscape I had ever seen before’. Traversing summit and bog, Kinder Scout’s terrain is rugged yet delicate, and the first showing of the resulting body of work is aptly situated in the basement gallery of the University of Huddersfield. As David walks me through the cluster of subterranean rooms, I feel I’m being led beneath the surface of a site I’d never realised was so stratified. Shimmering, large‑scale prints of heather pinned to wooden dams — wide slats of rough wood positioned on the gallery floor, with the prints draped and unfurling — offer glimpses of the microscopic detail and careful presentation evident throughout. Artefacts, archival materials, maps, experiments, and collected mosses and rocks are displayed with equal care, alongside photographic prints that range from archival to ephemeral.
The artist research project Bleak Plateaus, initiated in 2022 and from which this exhibition emerges, ‘seeks to develop modes of representation and aesthetic activations suitable for exploring the lively multiplicities of the North Derbyshire peatlands, against the backdrop of climate breakdown and the urgent need for ethico‑aesthetic repair.’ Peatlands are the world’s largest natural terrestrial carbon store, holding twice as much carbon as all forests combined. The UK’s peatlands store an estimated 3.2 billion tonnes, placing it 12th globally by peatland area. Once dismissed as outskirt wastelands, these bogs are now understood as powerful climate assets. Each work here grapples with the historical, environmental and physical complexity of Kinder Scout.
Eckersley explores the tension between growing leisure use of this most popular summit and the often-unseen environmental cost. Even walking can cause peat erosion, releasing stored carbon — a paradox in a time when access to green space is increasingly sought for wellbeing. Kinder Scout’s history of human intervention is marked in one stark black‑and‑white photograph, showing crater‑like scars where heather has been cut and burned to provide optimum feeding, breeding and sheltering habitat for grouse for shooting.
Archival materials from the working‑class movement to gain access to these lands are presented in ‘Untitled (If this were a stanza, who would read it?)’ (2025), referencing the 1932 ‘Mass Trespass’ — a pivotal protest that helped pave the way for the National Parks Act of 1949 and the opening of the Pennine Way. The exhibition resists romanticising this victory, the details and impact of which are still contested. The more I explore and read here, the more I am reminded that no ‘path’ we take as humans is without consequence.
Camera‑traps set up by the artist, triggered by movement, have captured those who cross the peak landscape at all hours. Collaged with coloured dots over hikers’ faces, the resulting images are both playful and evidential, and prompt questions about identity, class and our assumptions about who accesses the land. Human and non‑human subjects are included: a dog’s face is obscured by dots, a badger’s is not. These works pose even further questions surrounding how we extend respect and consideration to all living beings.
The exhibition also embraces the more eccentric histories of the site, including its designation as a ‘sacred mountain’ by George King of the Aetherius Society, a religious order founded in the mid-1950s based on contact with ‘extraterrestrial intelligences’. Elsewhere, Eckersley isolates stones in beautifully clear and stripped-back black-and-white Giclée prints on cotton rag. The clean, crisp forms are sculptural, offering up a singular typeface-like motif. In the series ‘Untitled (Alien Alphabet) (2025)’, Eckersley collates them, building an alien alphabet from Kinder Scout’s geology and asking, ‘What language could this landscape speak?’
Experimentation with anthotypes, phytograms (which both use natural chemicals or pigments occurring within plants) and expired film pushes at the material use and environmental cost of photographic processes, chemistry and waste. Found materials, from moss and bilberry to peat and crowberry, are integrated into the prints. The results are other-worldly — ambitious creative attempts to use photography to ‘see’ as the landscape might see. Back‑lit bog photographs ‘Untitled (Bog Flash no.2)’ and ‘Untitled (Bog Flash no.3)’ (both 2025) glow on lightboxes like preserved specimens, with skin‑like textures, fungal networks and suspended traces of life.
Some works place Eckersley himself in the frame, playfully undermining traditional masculine postures of conquest in the outdoors. In ‘Two attempts to look like a tree with varying degrees of success’ (2022), he’s face‑down on the ground, arms bent awkwardly, overtaken by the slope. The mountain has, quite literally, conquered the man.
The exhibition feels alive, developing at its own pace — much like the anthotype ‘I’ve never seen so much leisure!’ (2025), made from berries gathered on the peak and still changing under UV light throughout the duration of the exhibition. A playful and gentle approach runs through the work — patience, attentiveness, and openness to multiple readings. ‘Against the backdrop of climate breakdown,’ Eckersley writes in the exhibition copy, ‘[Acting in the Middle: A Glossary of Encounter] looks to activate a situated and transversal cutting across, in search of new ways of speaking about what we don’t yet have the proper words to express.’
Kinder Scout, with its labyrinthine ecologies, histories and politics, offers an inexhaustible terrain for inquiry. Eckersley has followed the familiar advice we would all do well to be reminded of — to ‘start where you stand’ — opening doorways to new bodies of work, speculative languages and dialogues across time. This exhibition feels like an open studio, a space of generous, careful attention, bearing witness to a landscape both battered and resilient, and inviting us to keep questioning, without ever expecting neat answers.
Joanna Jowett is a writer, artist and producer based in Leeds, and is also co-director of Copypages.org, an artist’s publishing platform.
Acting in the Middle: A Glossary of Encounter was shown at Sovereign Design House, University of Huddersfield, 27 June — 19 July 2025.
Published 26.09.2025 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
1,079 words
