Meaning, mapping and making of landscape

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2004 by Jeremy Melvin

Both the camera's and the real-estate surveyor's appropriation of landscape is in contrast to some modern artistic sensibilities, for whom the appropriation of territory--metaphorical or otherwise--is morally and politically incorrect. Richard Long, for instance, has said, 'I like the idea of using the land without possessing it', and he makes this explicit when referring to his works, they 'are made of the place, they are re-arrangements of it and in time will be reabsorbed by it'.

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The artist in the landscape

The history of the artist's relationship to landscape has been one of increasing intimacy with and intervention in the motif. This is partly because we have had too much landscape art. 'Today our sight is a little weary, burdened by the memory of a thousand images ... We no longer see Nature; we see pictures over and over again', said Cezanne in 1902. But Turner expressed the trend towards this intimate connection when he asked. 'What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea's like? I wish they'd been in it'. If the goal is not just to be out in the landscape but to be swept up into the forces of nature, the corollary is, as caught in Giuseppe Penone's, First Breath (1977), that the presence of the artist becomes fugitive and ephemeral. In 1999 he said, 'This work is a reminder that every breath we exhale is an introduction of one body of air into another, and that, in a sense, our innermost being is identical to and cannot be separated from the world around us'. We eat, drink, and breathe landscape.

The old dichotomies begin to collapse as artists emphasize their sense of symbiosis with, rather than detachment from, Nature. Sensing an interdependence with Nature, they sharpen ecological and political sensitivities. This profoundly affects the art of landscape in our day. Michael Snow said of his landscape film La Region Centrale, (1969): 'I recorded the visit of some of our minds and bodies and machinery to a wild place, but I didn't colonize it. I hardly even borrowed it'.

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SIMON CALLERY

Working alongside archaeologists gave Simon Callery an opportunity 'to see how a painter of the urban landscape from London's East End would respond to a paradigm of the English landscape'. In July 1996 in association with the photographer Andrew Watson, Callery documented a 20m x 40m trench at the chalk excavation at the Iron Age Segsbury Camp in Oxfordshire with 378 black and white images taken from a height of 2.5m. Invited back for the excavation of Alfred's Castle in 2000, he was 'eager to make a work that utilized the actual surface material of the excavation'. This resulted in a plasterwork, poured in 1m X 2m sections, across a 20m X 2m Bronze Age trench, that 'captured the entire chalk surface' rather than just taking its negative form. He discusses his work with Jeremy Melvin.

JM

One aspect of your engagement with landscape seems to be a reverse of the traditional reasons for painting nature. Traditionally landscape painting was a way of suggesting depth and distance beyond the individual, of externalizing feelings, and of setting up hierarchies according to distance from the viewer/painter. Your work seems to draw everything to the surface as if it were mirroring these sensations back to the individual, of focusing inwards rather than outwards.