Land Mine, 2005

“My work explores the idea of imagined threat and response, and looks at fear and planning for the unexpected, merging fact and fiction, fantasy and reality,” says Sarah Pickering. In her series Explosion, Pickering shows the English countryside violently disrupted by mines, artillery, and other weapons. On closer inspection, we see that these are small-scale simulated explosions, of the type used in military and police training exercises and special effects. Possessing the pyrotechnic allure of a magic trick, Land Mine is also a warning: in an image-centric culture, we can too easily admire simulations while forgetting the destructive capacities of arsenals maintained by governments and other entities around the world.