Woofferton’s Curtain Array, a 1940s BBC shortwave transmission station, surprised Rachel Ferriman as she drove round a Shropshire bend
As an 18-year-old art foundation student, Rachel Ferriman recalls a 1998 trip to Berlin when Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie ‘blew my mind’. Admittedly, she was from a small Oxfordshire town, had only visited London on day trips and this was only her second time abroad. Still, a year from pursuing a fine art photography BA, she knew a good thing when she saw it.
Later taught at the London College of Printing by artist photographers Tom Hunter, Claire Strand and Anna Fox, she had insights into not only how to produce images technically but to consider the image itself – what it was showing and what it might be suggesting. Maybe this nascent skill was triggered by her seeing Mies’s work ‘sitting on its plinth in open space, where despite being large and heavy, it seemed delicate to the point of weightlessness’.
Woofferton’s Curtain Array surprised her, driving round a rural Shropshire bend. It was built as a BBC shortwave transmission station in 1943, and what took Ferriman’s breath away was its array of 15 steel lattice masts, up to 100m in height, holding up 26 tensile wire curtains – ‘such a fragile, beautiful, unexpected thing sitting in the landscape’. In the Cold War, its increased size meant it could overcome the robust frequency jamming from behind the Iron Curtain. Now it stands at the fringe of obsolescence as Ferriman hints at its hidden layers.