Activity in 2022
The Landscape Research Group focused on three areas during 2022;
Landscape Art and the Climate Crisis. How can landscape art and curating shine a new light on problems or offer solutions for the climate crisis?
Access to landscape. With a particular focus on social, racial, medical and health barriers both to the landscape and landscape art.
British landscape and its international links. Exploring how Brexit will affect British landscape art and curation, and ask how we might overcome these barriers.
The first event held by the group was a screening of the commissioned film Longshore Drift by the artists Jane Watt and S E Barnet. It places the viewer within the overwhelming, precarious, ever-changing and remote landscape of Orford Ness on the Suffolk east coast. Through still and moving image, drawing and sound recording, the artists explore centuries of shifting coastline; of accretion and erosion of land; military and maritime buildings lost to the sea; and undulating disruptions of artificial attempts to shape the landscape. It is a film that has a strong focus on the shifting coastal landscape and climate crisis. The event was held online and helped to continue discussion about landscape art and the climate.
The second event that took place was in June 2022 and was a welcome return to meeting in person at the exhibition Recreating Constable in Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich. It included a curator-led tour of the exhibition, exploring the early Suffolk influences and personal friendships that created John Constable the artist. As well as experiencing the contemporary photographic installation Landscapes at Noon by artists Liz Harrington and Laurence Harding, specially commissioned to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Constable’s The Hay Wain. There were short talks/discussions with other members of the Landscape Group and the opportunity to explore the Suffolk Archives at The Hold. This event again had a focus on our local environment and talks on projects documenting the changes due to the climate emergency.
Our final event of the year was a talk from British Romanian artist and curator, Peter Harrap Constable vs Grigorescu: A Walk Off was hosted by the Romanian Cultural Institute and supported by the British Council. This was an opportunity to explore more about the British landscape and international links.
The group also supported two artists to produce commissions with links to landscapes in the East and West. Hayley Field is a Suffolk artist who started creating colour maps of the landscape she could see from her studio during lockdown. The Landscape commission will see these colour maps made accessible through a digital publication. Anna Dougherty is an artist, curator and researcher whose commission will respond to a stretch of the Severn using natural materials.
Activity in 2021
The Landscape Research Group focussed on three principal research themes over the 2020-21 period, relating to topical and urgent issues in society:
- Landscape art, mapping and the politics of power
- The landscape and wellbeing
- Landscape art and the climate crisis
The group took these themes as the central focus for three online seminar-style events, featuring speakers from a range of professional and social backgrounds all with different perspectives and approaches to the topic. Hearing from curators and academics, artists and educators, each seminar event covered several aspects of the research questions and generated fruitful discussion between speakers and audience. Some examples that demonstrate the range of talks include: an interrogation of the categorisation of knowledge through an artistic fusion of historical maps and medical collections records; the importance of wellbeing and healing at the heart of fine art collections, with a ground-breaking nurse-in-residence position at a gallery; and the use of historic coastal landscape artworks and early photography in charting the changing sea-levels and planning to avoid catastrophic damage to coastal communities around the UK.
The group also held various smaller-scale events such as online tours of exhibitions, exhibition workshops and commission presentation events. These less formal Zoom events were positively received and allowed members to connect with each other and engage with artistic topics outside their usual spheres. A particular highlight was the virtual tour of an exhibition on the Bristol School of landscape artists, Absolutely Bizarre, at the Bordeaux Musée des Beaux-Arts. This Zoom tour not only provided a wonderful insight into a group of artists little known outside the Bristol area, but also allowed international dialogue amidst travel restrictions and the decreasing ease of cross-border collaboration after Brexit. This invigorating partnership motivated the group to keep the international angle on British art as a central theme for research activity in 2022.
Recordings of talks and presentations from the Landscape group’s programme are available here.
Jenny Gaschke, Helen Record and Emma Roodhouse, January 2022
