Mark Time | Epynt 85 Mlynedd

Mark Time explores military readiness, biodiversity and traces of a displaced farming community within the Ministry of Defence's Sennybridge Training Area. A landscape that bears the marks of preparation without ever becoming a battlefield itself.

Mark Time | Epynt 85 Mlynedd examines a landscape where preparation for war has become a continuous condition. Made over fifteen months (DECEMBER 2024 - MARCH 2026) within the Ministry of Defence Sennybridge Training Area on the Epynt plateau in Wales, the project considers how military rehearsal, ecological life and the traces of a displaced farming communities occupy the same ground.

In 1940, on the brink of WW2, the War Office in Westminster instructed the farming community on the Epynt plateau to leave so the land could become a military training area, large enough to fire large artillery with no implications. Today, this approximately 31,000 acre landscape accommodates military training for British and NATO forces.

Edwards' attention settled on the marks through which different uses of the land became visible: military debris, vegetation, former farm buildings and the structures of simulated environments used for training of troops for conflicts elsewhere. Human presence is encountered through what has been left behind, maintained or altered.

Mark Time refers to the military action of marching without moving forward. For Edwards, it described the tension she encountered between repetition and change and how the land is reset after each exercise. This exact push and pull considers how the landscape carries both the remnants of an earlier life and the infrastructure of anticipated conflict.

Edwards arrived at Epynt without a personal connection to its former community. Her photographs began from a position of unfamiliarity, asking how sustained observation reveals relationships that are difficult to witness within a singular visit. The absence of people directs attention towards the ground itself: how it is organised, inhabited and made ready for what comes next.

Mark Time asks what it means for a place once called home to become a site of preparation and how photography can make that condition visible through its everyday traces inside one of Britain's most restricted landscapes.