The Nature of Landscape
Visions and Distillations of Landscape and Place
The original idea behind this show was to bring three artists together who each has a very different approach to landscape as a subject. All three share some common ground; the attention to layers and surface, the importance or acknowledgement of process in the work, a regard for the revealed and the hidden. Similarly, though, their differences couldn’t be more delicious – particularly where an approach to colour is concerned. Accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Alexandra Harwood – and latterly, artist, Judith Tucker, this body of work is a feast for the senses and a treat for the thoughtful.
Richard Kenton Webb’s work is part of a massive ongoing enquiry into colour. He sees all of his work as being rooted in and inspired by the landscape, and himself as part of that English visionary tradition. Currently (July 2009) concentrating on red, the work has been made in movements of colour: Dark Red, Middle Red, Light Red – and the pigments for each have been hand-ground into paint by Richard as an important part of the process and consideration of the surface of the work, reflecting both the materiality of the paint itself and its origins (the earth and it’s minerals). This work is concerned with specific places in the Cotswolds; there is a conscious / sub-conscious placing and conversation with the sites, from which numerous drawings were made, more to grasp the intangibleness of the place, its feel, rather than a visual likeness, which in turn have grown into and developed as paintings, sculptures, prints.
This has something in common with Jeremy Leigh’s work, whose drawings and paintings are in part about entering the open road, looking around, and sensing that there is more there than can be seen – he talks of a non-visible vision, one that is felt. Mostly inspired by a particular stretch of road by his South Yorkshire home, these pieces are the results of a journey of enquiry through the exploration and search for visualisation; the mark and trace have become significant issues in the work. The drawings have explored this relationship, and the marks and traces have become embedded in the relationships that exist within a piece, through an accumulation of layers, a striving for the essence and unfolding present ness of the journey.
In David Ainley’s work, the images often reveal the history of change in the traces of colour left around the edges of forms. For almost forty years, his painting has involved approaches in which changing states and ‘histories’ have been significant concerns. The fact that he lives in Bolehill, Derbyshire, in a landscape mined for lead since Roman times, and more recently extensively quarried, is significant. His work does not view ‘heritage’ as spectacle, but something which encourages the cultivation of awareness of, and sensitivity to slower, longer-term changes in our surroundings related to contemporary debates around tensions between conservation and economic development. He is particularly interested in aspects of landscape which testify to people’s labour and initiative exploiting the physical resources of the environment, traces of which remain, often-most hidden in our surroundings. Somewhat aligned in a way with Richard and Jeremy, there is a dialogue within his work which extends to considerations of different aspects of disciplines; questions involving pre-determination, and chance, and consideration of the place of drawing in painting and painting as sculpture. Nothing as blatant as a tipping over into synaesthesia, but a sort of cross- pollination.
David’s work also has something in common with that of Judith Tucker, in that memory and postmemory may to an extent be seen as a shared concern, along with the resonance of the human effect on the landscape. Judith’s most recent work, which we are privileged to include for the first time (January 2010), has begun with a series of drawings including evocative titles: Emergence, Entry, and Surfacing – through which she hopes to show drawing as a privileged medium to explore connections and disconnections between her source material of pre-war snapshots and contemporary images of beach resorts on the Danish island of Bornholm. Working in the landscape itself has been n important part of the process of making these pieces, which all at the same time, re-present a tourist landscape and a military landscape, in an attempt to explore the possibility of unexpected depths both in the potential of what they might become as drawings (perhaps eventual paintings) and in what their mnemonic resonance – both conscious and unconscious – might be.
As a collection of work, The Nature of Landscape juxtaposes the differences and similarities between each artist’s approach, and the results. The work raises awareness of the intangibility of landscape, of the importance of being aware of our surroundings and looking under both literal and metaphorical surfaces. It also displays some interesting elements of human nature and how approaches in creative methodologies and process are as much a part of the artists’ interior landscape. If an artist’s chosen art form is a search to find and / or communicate the deeper self, then the work gathered together here could be seen as an authentic and successful embodiment of a fragment or manifestation of The Nature of Landscape, as well as of human nature. Jeremy Leigh quotes Michael Fried, whose 1967 article, Art & Objecthood concludes with the prophetic and enigmatic words: “Presentness is Grace”; The Nature of Landscape is where these artists are now, and now in this credit-crunch society, could be just when we should be thinking about, or being in the landscape – be that interior, urban, or countryside – inhabiting the moment.
Linda Ingham
July 2009
(Revised January 2010)