I was able to get to the RWA (the Royal West of England Academy) in Bristol on the 22nd to see a show I'd seen some notices for some time ago, and thought I'd try to get to see before it ended up as another Fruitmarket scenario. An exhibition of the work of members of a group called "Lan2D" was on, which is a group working on art's relationship to the landscape, and the various cultural and philosophical offshoots of that. It's coordinated by Iain Biggs, who's one of my PhD advisors, and it features the work of several people I've been taught by or worked alongside, so there was a feeling of familiarity about the show which was only dented a little bit by having to pay to get in to see it.
It's been a while since I've been into the building, which was refurbished last year (parts of the interior are still looking a bit imperfect, but I think the way it is is sort of characterful, like the desk fans screwed to the wall to provide ventilation on the admittedly rare hot days). There was quite a lot to see here. I'm not going to write about all of it, because I could go on for ages.
Mick McGraw's work first. I met him a couple of years ago when my friend Andrew Atkinson had a residency at Glasgow School of Art, where Mick McGraw runs Printmaking. I had a chance to review one of this books for the artists' books yearbook a couple of years ago, but despite my writing admiring things about his book, the copy got lost somewhere between my writing it and the printing. Mea culpa, most likely, but it's a shame. The book I reviewed, Three Fifths Fluid, seems to fit in well with the work I'm seeing here. There's a relationship with the Scottish landscape that's partly personal, partly historical. partly scientific (geological), and partly mythical, I think, too. The creation of myth around landscape is always a conflation of these different human approaches to the world, layering the experiences and thoughts of others onto the world we experience. This is a theme that comes up again and again throughout the exhibition, not just mythical, but all sorts of cultural overlays. In fact "Overlay" might have made a good essay title for the show. Returning to McGraw's work though, there were a series of large stretchers with letterbox-format photos and prints on them. These have a theme running through them- different images of the ancient remnant forests of Scotland. If memory serves, these are patches of forest that survive from a time before Scotland's forests were largely coniferous, so there are lots of different species of a less Scandinavian character. They're like little islands. I can't remember clearly enough to say what their relationship to glaciation is, but there is one, so that the forests themselves share the timescale of the land they're growing in: the events that shape the rocks around them have also shaped them. In a sense, there is a "culture" a relationship, anyway, here, that isn't human- it's an older relationship where the trees overlay (that word again) the land with their ecological culture. This changes, different events and forces drive away the old culture and replace it with the new (coniferous, human) cultures.
There are senses in which trees, forests, capture human culture, too. The growth rings of trees capture data about air quality, holding it under the trees' skin like a tattoo, and the macroscopic scale of the forest carries traces of habitation and industry. ( I can remember being in such an ancient remnant forest, years ago, where charcoal works had served a foundry. The forest held this archaeological data, too) The remnants hold out, are islands in a sea of change that can't be absorbed (like the early charcoal workings), waiting for the axe to fall- or more likely to be swept aside by the bulldozer. Well, maybe not. At least some of these sites are protected. They remind me of a passage in The Child That Books Built, by Francis Spufford. Spufford is talking about the character of the forest in story. They stand for wild places, inhuman, or maybe just soaked in primeval humanity. Spufford talks about the notion of an untouched piece of forest down a ravine somewhere in Britain where noone has ever set foot. I don't imagine that this could be true of our Ancient remnants, but they hold that sense of time just the same.
McGraw's photos and prints look at these patches of forest and individual trees, surveying land and tree together and showing the tenacity but fragility of the forests' hold upon the land. It's patchy, windswept, hemmed in by roads and civilisation. It's a rich resource though, a hidden archive, a holdout that has been overlaid so long but used so natively, that one might never know it was there.
I walked on, by now glad of the desk fans screwed to the wall. It gets rather warm in this gallery.
Paul Gough's work here consists of a series of studies for "Southern Region". Gough's work has been rooted in war imagery for a long time. Memorials and landscape and story come together in maps, grounds, structures and masses, weaponlike, fortresslike forms that rise up almost heraldically out of the ground. One of these pastels is a sort of x-ray of a tunnel, a sapper's hole with an entrance at one end and a crater at the other. The land bearing the traces of the event. And the traces marked and encoded here as a memorial of the event, but made unspecific. There's a symbolic and spatial shorthand here, the cutaway view, the x-ray, that simplifies and dramatises the event so that we can approach it, and the events it relates to, as a story.
I really started to get the sense of 'Overlay' as a theme, when I looked at Jane Millar's work. Several pictures, painted and pastelled- in, literally overlaid with lines of beadwork. Three sets of pictures: some based on pictures from a Mars Rover, one at least of a mountain scene, and several of a tornado. The concerns of these groups mesh with one another. In the "Mars" pictures, the desolate Martian surface hosts the proxy human gaze of the camera, taking the photo the picture is based on. There have been several points over the last couple of decades where evidence seems to have been found for the presence, at some point in history, of microbial life on Mars. We still don't know. But the Rover's job is to find out, and to send us back images of our new lands. They're already mythologized. The map of mars is covered with names, (Who gets to pick them?). The surface of Mars, depicted in this picture, at least, sports carpets. These carpets (products, traditionally, of desert cultures on Earth), lie in the dust of the Martian desert here. As the rover's lens pulls them into focus, they're literally embroidered onto the surface of the image. The strings of beads, themselves resembling mats of microbes, are overlaid onto the desert ground. The surface of the planet is covered in a culture like the surface of a Petri dish. The carpet implies both the presence of life, and the codifying presence of the human gaze, filling the land with stories.
The "Mountain" sequence, though recognisably Earthlike, shows a snowy mountain scene, with the summit of a mountain and a small Alpine settlement below, separated by a forest and the towering bulk of the mountain. The small house and the peak are embroidered. I'm starting to read the embroidered parts at this stage as a cipher for human presence. The picture’s called (I think) "So where are you now?". The options seem to be- either cosily ensconced in the lodge at the foot, or shivering at the top. There seems to be an implication of a 'phone conversation, so there may be a pair of mobile-equipped people, with one in each location, but which one's doing the talking, I don't know. Again there's a sense of human culture moving across the landscape here- at the summit and the foot of the mountain. No in-between here, only destinations, with the invisible words communicating across the distance. Beamed across the landscape's intervening darkness and confusion of the natural world, just as the Martian carpets fly across the vacuum between the planets. Both are digital, both quantizing the world into short, separated statements. The pixilation of the beads recapitulates the "pixilation" culture imposes on the world.
Finally, there's the "Tornado" pictures. These look like weather, with the pastelled cone of a tornado whipping across a horizon just out of frame, or a square the colour of overcast, stormy sky. Here the beadworks seem less human, I think. There's a sense in which they resemble a very definitely human overlay- systems of pressure and ionisation, metaphors for understanding the forces at play in this natural phenomenon. There's also a sense in which they portray (and so I suppose, to that extent, they still are a cultural portrayal) actual patterns of pressure and charge. There may be channels for lightning here, there may be hanging sheets of charges locked into the atmosphere. There is dust swept up into the vortex, or perhaps, here amidst the destruction, the threads of human culture are swept up and separated- perhaps the embroidery we see here is that of a pattern being torn apart and redistributed by nature. There's an irony at work here- the closer we get to a depiction of a peaceful, habitable landscape ( From Mars, down to the arable plains that Tornadoes frequent), the more violent the image becomes. Mars is peaceful: our gaze weaves complexity here, and we can hold out on the rugged slopes of a mountain, but at home on the farm everything's gone wrong. The best we can see here is the gaze of scientists trying to hold the smallest ideas in place amidst the maelstrom. I'm not sure if this is intentional on Millar's part (nor, of course, am I sure of any of it- I am merely working my own embroidery across the surfaces her work provides), but there seems a strong comment about where our intelligence turns its gaze, its effort, its humanity. To Mars, or to shanties and trailer parks?
Sian Bonnell's "Serving Suggestions" are photos of food made up as landscapes. Again we've got the humanisation of landscape going on. Here, perhaps literalized in agricultural terms: a field could raise so much beef or so many potatoes. A chalk cliff is a face of mashed potato fringed with the green of peas. The cultural significance of food (bully beef for Britain, boiled beef and carrots to see us through) is played on, with the humour of the images patching into the nostalgia their depictions suggest. The raw material of the land is transformed through enculturation into the "cooked" material of the landscape, here quite literally.
Iain Biggs' work is represented here too. Quite a lot of his work recently has centred around material collected and inspired by Borders history and culture. It's a bit too close to my own projects in Whistling Copse for me to see it very clearly. Biggs has approached the material from a number of different angles, mythical and historical and even musically examining the subject, which shines out cryptically. There are series of related images forming a semantic field that tells us something over time and examination, like the interpretation of x-ray crystallography that allowed researchers to interpolate the structures of molecules. The images themselves are like unknown hieroglyphs, hovering on the edge of meaning, but with a definite syntactical relationship with each other. My own approach to similar material ( at the moment everything's a bit quiet on this front) has been more literal, possibly more textual. There may be something to be said for this less literal imaging, something which I'll be thinking about over the next few days.
Dan Shipsides' work comprised a number of photos of large, old looking boulders somewhere in France, and a video piece. The video showed people climbing on these rocks. Not easy climbs by the look of them, but one which can be taught, codified, tried against and eventually overcome. A climber tries and fails, tries and fails, tries and finally makes it. Climbers falling the few feet to the ground utter FRENCH CURSES as their grip gives way. Diagrams appear on the screen, showing the diagram of the climb: climber's notes and the special marks indicating holds and positions appear on the roughly depicted anatomy of the boulders. It made me think of one of the first stories I read, of the discovery of the caves at Lascaux by children. These boulders, so old and French, seem to have been 'peopled' long long ago, so worn and smooth are they, presumably by some geological or water effect, but seemingly by being immersed in the intensity and relentlessness of human habitation and human regard for so long. Not to mention being scrambled over by wiry French guys with moustaches. There's a sense in which the access we normally make with our gaze/intellect to the landscape, is here dramatised physically. Rather than tracing a contour or balancing along the line of a shadow by eye, our protagonists here are physically engaging with the big rocks, enduring the agony and the ecstasy of getting to the top the hard way. This is paralleled in the text which come up on screen, a long text of Cézanne addressing Basquet ( I'm sorry to say I don't know who Basquet is). The gist of the text is about the difficulty of capturing images of the real world, the difficulty of addressing one's gaze, one's concentration, to the subject just right: "if I pass too high or too low- bang", paraphrases a passage. As if Cézanne is shuffling along the ledge himself, gripping tightly but trying to stay nimble. Even the end of the ascent is difficult. The final few feet over the curving lip of the edge are deceptive- finishing the climb and finishing the picture are difficult.
Another part of the gallery was showing the work of Michael Garton, a member of the RWA who died recently, and whose later work was concerned with landscape. The standout pieces for me were a pair of diptychs with a high horizon, showing a piece of forest in summer and winter. I met Peter Reddick, the printmaker, as I was looking, and found out from him that Garton would go to a place and leave his equipment there for a long time, as he visited and revisited, looking and looking and looking, climbing slowly towards the picture. They're monumentally observed. The depth and form of the trees, stacking themselves off towards the horizon with twigs flaring and boskiness rampant, is realised far better than any photo could in this subject. There's a depth of formal realisation here that takes on the formidably abstract drawing problem presented by a bunch of trees and works with it on terrifically brave terms. These images interrogate the landscape closely, and above all, personally. Although the style and handling couldn't be different, I'm reminded of Ivon Hitchens, toiling away in his wood, trying to capture something of the place. What I think Garton found, and which is here in his work, is a kaleidoscope of change and fixity, painting that is firmly realistic, but goes so deeply into the seeing that it becomes abstract. Working in these spaces, returning and returning, and getting closer and closer to the land itself. Imagine returning and having to clear away the ivy twining about the easel.
Like all the other work I saw that day, there was a human gaze working on a landscape, finding there not only the plants and animals and earth, but the dreams of everyone else as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment