As prime agricultural land, East Anglia has seen many 'improvements', which artists have chosen either to ignore or to represent. The question of what constitutes good husbandry has been associated with a wider question: whether the artist's role is to document change, or to preserve a vanishing world.

Morris, who lived at Benton End, Suffolk, was horrified by the slaughter of wildlife wrought by pesticides and crop-sprays in the 1960s. Together with the removal of hedges and woodland, these threatened to create a toxic wasteland. Here, birds lie dead in a bleak, unending field.