Tying together the underpinnings of a joint exhibition

In the last few months, I have been making a body of work for a joint exhibition with the documentary photographer Aaron Yeandle. In trying to think how our work would fit best together, I’ve been mulling over the differences and similarities in our work; why we feel an affinity for each other’s work; and why our approach to landscape is different from many other local artists.

Looking at landscape specifically, as this is the focus of our joint exhibition, this has always been a contested term. It means different things to different people. In the west, it was only officially considered an independent genre in the 16th century, and one that was seen as inferior to history painting, portraiture and still life. It came to prominence in the late 18th century during the rise of romanticism, moving through impressionism, abstraction and land art in the 20th century. Today, landscape remains a vibrant field, with artists exploring diverse themes and incorporating media such as photography and film as well as installation art and site-specific work.

Landscape art today is not just about capturing the picturesque. It can be used to consider cultural, social and economic development, environmental degradation, urbanisation, displacement and warfare. Contemporary landscape is deeply rooted in human experience, it covers the urban as well as the rural and the decaying and derelict along with the beautiful and the sublime.

The term does not just refer to real places, landscape can also be an imaginary space or an internal space conjured up via daydream or half-remembered dreams. It can be a potent carrier of memory and identity, as well as a conveyor of emotions. It captures and embodies how the painter or photographer feels in the world, through the use of evocation and metaphor.

For many, ‘landscape’ is also a means of exploring the human condition and our relationship with the world and other life forms. The planet is so dominated by humans that it’s ecological balance has ended. We are living in post-natural times, in a world in which the use of fossil fuels has altered the earth’s atmosphere, our waterways and oceans are polluted by fertilisers, industrial waste and plastics and intensive farming has depleted the health of the soils. It is likely to be an age of mass ecocides, species extinctions and post-natural disasters. This comes to me at times when I paint, contemplating the future world that the next generations will have to endure.

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In thinking about the relationship of painting and photography, I will write first about painting as this is the primary focus of my art practice. Painting is a shifting elusive entity that flickers between what it is depicting and its ‘objectness’, i.e. its material embodiment of oil on canvas or watercolour on paper. Painting and drawing are material practices that produce one-off works of art. Painting is produced by the hand, eye and our physical embodiment, through mark, gesture, but also our senses - sound, smell, touch and taste all contribute to making. Paintings and drawings are material practices that produce one-off pieces of work.

Photography is also made through the hand, eye and evocation of the senses, but is captured through mechanical or digital means that is able to create multiple identical images. While the first examples of photography were set up to record reality, its traditional documentary function has moved in multiple directions. Fine art photography is now an autonomous conceptual medium of artistic expression that may adopt elements of painting, cinematography and performance; it may contain elements of surrealism, minimalism or abstraction. Stylistically it plays with form, lighting, composition and narrative. Photographers regularly combine documentary and conceptual methods to explore personal yet universal visual themes.

While photography’s ability to reproduce images democratises visual culture, making it far more available to mass audiences, it also makes the image far easier to commodify and also to be used for political ill. These negative factors do not make photography less valid as an art form.

Photography and painting are both capable of producing either abstract or representational images that are based around signs and signifiers. A key part of how they differ though is that the process of painting (and drawing) involves human action and movement – the gestures and actions through which they are made. Making them is an embodied act. Meaning is therefore intuited in the action of painting or drawing. The paintings produced are records of the movements that have existed in time. There is a dialogue between the ‘objectness’ of the painting and its way of creating illusionistic space, pattern or colour field as virtual space.

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Aaron thinks of himself first and foremost as an artist, with the camera merely being a tool by which he captures and creates his art practice. He studied for a fine art MA rather than photography course, as he knew after his BA in photography that he had no interest in commercial photography - his work was far about communicating his own personal vision and inner emotional landscape.

His strongest influences since art school have been painters rather than photographers. His favourite painter is Caspar David Friedrich, the German romantic painter of the late 18th century and early 19th century. The dialogue with Friedrich is really evident in Aaron’s landscape photography which is really rich and painterly, making very subtle use of light and colour.

(Above) paintings by Caspar David Friedrich.

Talking last week over lunch, he told me that landscape work has always been a thread running alongside his better known portraiture work. He said: “It is a natural thing for photography and landscapes and painting to come together. And especially in Guernsey. A lot of people here consider landscapes in Guernsey to be beautiful. And for them, that is what photography captures. Well, see, I don't do that. It's a whole different way of looking at our environment.”

Working on projects such as his night photography work that are part of this exhibition involve a walking exploration of a site, spending time in it alone at different times of day. The site is then carefully lit, test images taken, and the lighting altered before he gets into shooting photographs. The process of making these shots is very far removed from taking a snapshot. He says that it is important for him to completely slow down and be in the moment while he is taking images. The results are beautifully lit, minimalist shots that hold the viewer suspended in time, poring over the complex forms of tree roots, solitary trees or the angular geometry of German brutalist architecture with all of its dark symbolism.

Aaron views the work of American photographer, Joel Sternfeld’s project “Walking the High Line” as an early photographic influence. “Sternfield made a body of work in the late 70s in New York of a derelict railway line and buildings - showing the forgotten commercial line where the rural had started to take back all the urban land. So they're really beautiful. It's kind of bleakish, but it's how nature's been reclaiming from man.”

(Above - images from Walking the High Line.)

The Photographer, Gem Southam’s “The Red River” made in Cornwall in the 1980s, is another of Aaron’s photographic influences. Southam captures the interconnections of industry and a manufactured landscape within the natural world. The Red River was considered a real paradigm shift at the time, when working in colour was uncommon. His compositions and close up angles were very different to the norm when photographing the landscape. These unconventional images were interspersed with traditional landscape imagery influenced by English Romanticism and also the narratives of everyday life of the people living in the area. His work in this project contained the straggling ruins of Cornwall’s tin mining past as they slowly merged with the plant life and waterways. There is beauty, but also bleakness and destruction to this body of work.

(Above - photograph’s from Jem Southam’s The Red River.)

“Southam saw the landscape as a confluence of its inhabitants and the valley’s primordial formation and ancient mythologies. The Carboniferous granite, Bronze Age adits, and medieval tales of travellers lost on a winter’s night, stumbling upon a solitary illuminated window exist in harmony within these photographs. The artist explores the concept of history itself in this series, which he sees concentrated within this river and its fern laden banks.

Southam drew heavily from the Book of Genesis for this project: a tempest over a dark sea, punctuated with white capped waves references God’s creation of light and darkness out of a formless void. Primeval elements of the landscape, foliage and the rushing of the river’s red water, reference the second day of creation. Bucolic idylls juxtapose representations of the despoliation of the Earth and its subsequent regeneration. Southam’s relationship to the English landscape was profoundly influenced by poetry, in particular works by Beowulf, John Milton, and John Bunyan.

The photographer saw an allegory in his journey along the Red River that went beyond local history, something universal wrought within all of the valley’s shattered remains and ‘poisonous tang’, as he calls it, its beauties and redemptions.” Jem-Southam-The-Red-River-Press-Release.pdf

There are parallels with Southam’s work in terms of one strand of thought underpinning our exhibition next March. This is the impact of humanity on the landscape and nature’s reclamation of these sites over time. I suppose like many UK painters and photographers who focus on the post-industrial landscape – our work looks at the impact of the horticultural industry on the topography of the island. This long-dead industry and the impact of the German Occupation in WWII, were the most significant factors of change in the 20th century.

Aaron asked about my landscape influences. I felt unable to name them at the time as they are so many and they are so varied. They range from Bruegel to Constable, the Nashes and Sickert, Archile Gorky and David Bomberg to Joan Mitchell and Richard Diebenkorn. The quiet pastoral Englishness of Ivon Hitchens is a powerful influence on my use of colour as space, and rugged wildness of Joan Eardley influences my mark-making. In terms of contemporary painters, they are equally numerous and diverse. They include painters such as Judith Tucker, Georg Wilson, Pam Evelyn and Nick Goss, and photographers Sian Davey and Tish Murtha.

(Above cloclwise from top left) Paul Nash, Ivon Hitchens, Joan Eardley, Pan Evelyn, Sian Davey, Nick Goss, Judith Tucker, Judith Tucker.

Like Aaron, I do not focus on landscape in relation to its picturesqueness. The conventional tourist views of sunset at Cobo or the south coast headlands and bays are wonderful, but they do not interest me as subject matter for paintings. Instead, I seem to be drawn both to overlooked sites and taken-for-granted hinterlands; but also to the sublime – those places that send the chill of awe prickling down your spine. The latter are sites that hold a darkness and bring about the realisation of our human fleetingness in comparison with the deep time of the rock formations and landmasses. Somehow the sheer age of these natural sites provide a powerful lens for understanding human impact in the age of the Anthropocene.

(Above - my current work in progress)

So often on a small island we travel the same routes, take in the same air and pass the same buildings week in and week out, so we fail to notice those commonplace constructions and artefacts that have become a taken for granted part of our habitat. The thousands of bunkers scattered across the landscape, their graffitied surfaces memorialising lost love; the corrugated walls of an abandoned flower packing shed empty and forlorn; or the rusting bulk of an industrial steamer, buried deep amongst bracken and brambles. Our painting and photography draws on these forgotten and abandoned sites that hold the weight and layers of our social history.

Sites of myth, legend and the sublime – the fairy ring and the megalithic burial tombs; the enormous pink granite headland at Albecq – still give me goosebumps especially in a certain low winter light. Aaron who has lived here about 15 years said he feels an inexplicable darkness in Guernsey that lifts from him when he travels off island. Perhaps this is all I have ever known, but I feel at peace with Guernsey’s shadowed vales and shrouded landmasses.

(Above - recent work of Aaron’s)

Aaron and I are both interested in the changes to the land and how history and industry shape it. This is a huge subject in its own right, which deserves more time and thought. Inevitably though, our discussion on the nature and feel of the Island, moved on to how built up the island has become. This is an enormous challenge to biodiversity, but it also impacts on the everyday pleasure of wandering the lanes and valleys – memories of which are signifiers of my free-range, nature-obsessed childhood.

The Island has become more affluent since the arrival of the offshore finance industry (or should I say, the affluent have become more affluent and the wealth gap has grown). This is again re-shaping the landscape as huge mansions spring up to replace modest bungalows and 1930’s villas. Walking towards Pleinmont Headland a few weeks ago, another new vast steel-framed construction appeared in my eye line - a looming skeletal brachiosaurus overshadowing the modest granite cottages of the hillside valley. Change is inevitable and often positive, but it remains seen whether the growing wealth of the islands richest decile will improve island life as a whole, and not just be to the detriment of the ecology and the less well off.

While making a political statement is never the focus of my work or Aaron’s, and exhibition will not dwell on this, the political and social are embedded in our work, as they are in every part of life. What do we wish to achieve with this exhibition? I guess this would be for the viewers to take time with our work, think about our natural environment, and perhaps view the island with refreshed eyes.