John Gossage has been one of my big discoveries during this course, recommended by one of the staff at the Martin Parr Foundation. His book The Pond appealed to me initially as it’s an intensive, evocative examination of a place that includes many elements also of interest to me – borders, misuse, traces. But what Gossage has really opened my eyes to is the possibility of texture – and specifically messiness, scruffiness.

I’ve long been drawn to line over texture – as in my motorway bridges work, tree shadows, pylons, field patterns, and of course urban environments. But nature is messy, and that mess thwarts clean lines. Gossage embraces that mess – to an extent, so does Baltz – and yet elegant use of line emerges in a symbiotic relationship. This picture is an excellent example. The right third of the frame is a mess of leaves, and the left hand river bank, which would have given the right hand back’s curve emphasis, is hidden behind a small, scruffy tree. This undermines what could have been a picturesque river curve, but it also echoes the scruffy path running alongside it. The Pond demonstrates an unofficial, uncurated natural environment, its human paths more like animal tracks, as if somehow such an environment, with its litter and forgotten barbed wire, is closer to ‘nature’ than the carefully framed and composed places of more conventional landscape photography. Such unfussy human intrusion is present here in the sawn-off branch, an act of violence perhaps, that acts as counterpoint and subversion of the upright trees to the right of the photo and the very young tree in the foreground, the image’s only clean lines.

I’ve embraced mess and found form in texture since encountering Gossage. It’s been a revelation, and has also helped me rethink colour. As my commons project will include the messy landscapes of heath and birch woodland, this is just as well.