At the Edges brings together the work of four artists that explore shifting visions of the landscape and the discourse around how these images are experienced.Taking into consideration the nature of representation as much as the representation of nature, the works investigate the mediated image of the landscape, addressing the relationship between the actual and the imagined across combinations of images and objects.Presented in the exhibition are interconnected depictions of the natural world; a collection of fictions that weave idyllic, familiar and dystopian visions, through models of conscious fabrication, that together inquire into our relationship to our environment.
Hannah Brown’s paintings and sculptures draw on the omnipresent legacy of the English landscape tradition. Working within and against this framework she presents carefully edited interpretations of seemingly bucolic scenes. Her oil paintings depict versions of our landscape, emptied of people and obvious signs of life, under a familiar flat grey English light. Her sculptures function as physically present motifs that refer back to the paintings and the tradition of idealized versions of nature manufactured for domestic display.
Gary Colclough’s works consider the act of looking, and how looking relates to understanding. His sculptures present hand-drawn images within spatial and temporal arrangements that mediate the viewers’ experience of the image. Drawing on references to the Arts and Craft furniture, esoteric geometry, and optical contraptions, his diagrammatic structures function as both as spatial sculptures and presentation devices for drawings. The images in his work, meticulously rendered in coloured pencil, explore the allure of the depiction of nature, through the evocation of early natural history illustrations.
Boo Ritson’s recent sculptural works, explore vistas of romantic American landscapes, filtered through references to constructed environments that draw on photography, collage and landscape painting. Simultaneously functioning as images and object, Ritson’s constructions are collaged from pictures originally taken at her home in Chesham; the American picturesque filtered through a very British lens. Her works often take on the appearance of artificial environments that populate video games and virtual reality. Fabricated landscapes, both familiar and slightly ominous, create settings in which the unknown may manifest.
Jane Ward’s images of imaginary and transient landscapes are at once both familiar and disturbing. They are constructed from digital photographs, which have been repeatedly broken down and collaged, printed and then manipulated by hand. The images bear the traces of earlier actions and forms, imbuing the works with a sense of memory and the passage of time. Ward’s working process and the resultant images allude to the cycles of destruction and regeneration witnessed in our everyday surroundings.
At the Edges is accompanied by a publication featuring an essay by Graham Crowley.
jane ward art 