Uncommon Ground

Uncommon Ground:
New Art from the Landscape
The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London
(15 Feb – 2 March 2017)

Uncommon Ground: New Art from the Landscape brings together the work of 11 contemporary Artists at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in Kensington, London, to bear witness to the reciprocal, critical and often unclarifiable relationship between the artist and the landscape.

Cultural Geographer Hayden Lorimer struggles to locate the meaning of Landscape ‘at the intersection between myth, ecology and topography.’[1]Exploring this dilemma further, he states that it is both ‘an amalgam of memory, weather and work’ and ‘a fusion of authorship, artistry and industry’ – it remains impossible to settle on a narrow definition.

Lorimer asserts that as ‘living proof of our own permeability’, landscape is ‘impossible without us’. It is both this instability of definition and an insistence on the primacy of us, as artists, in landscape that Uncommon Ground will celebrate and explore.

Such explorations will be through direct engagement with or quiet reflection on the landscape, using a range of material processes and different methods of observation. All the artists exhibiting in the show indicate their presence in the landscape whilst referencing that landscape in their work.

In laying a few markers within the sweep of Lorimer’s fluctuating definitions, Uncommon Ground will bear witness to the reciprocal, critical and often unclarifiable relationship between the artist and the landscape.

The Uncommon Ground Artists are:
Wan Lin Chang
Catalina Christensen
Lucy Devenish
Zanny Mellor
Eigil Nordstrom
Jessica Oliver
Anthony Ratcliffe
Tamsin Relly
Brian Thompson
Emily Thornton
Luke M. Walker

About the Curators:

Lucy Devenish and Luke M. Walker are both fine artists based in London. They have collaborated on a number of recent shows together including a joint show: Convergence: Swim, Walk, Explore (Vyner Street, Spring 2016)  and curated and exhibited several group shows: What I Tell you in the Dark (St John’s Crypt, Waterloo, 2015); The Mountain Arts Festival (Rheged, Cumbria, 2015); and A Day in the Hills (MAF 2016, Rheged, Cumbria, 2016).

They share a common interest in the immersive experience of landscape through walking, swimming and recording. This is expressed through painting, printmaking and films both collaboratively and independently.

https://www.artrabbit.com/events/uncommon-ground-new-art-from-the-landscape

[1] Tate Magazine, Issue 36 Spring 2016, p. 91.