Lie back and think of the English countryside: do you picture rolling hills, bales of hay, endless green, quaint villages, rural idylls, bucolic perfection, Gainsborough, Constable, Turner? Of course you do, it’s in our national psyche, so ingrained in our public consciousness that it has its own visual vocabulary. But this little exhibition at the William Morris Gallery proves English landscape art is about much more than undulating hills and gambolling lambs.
But it does start with a sombre-ly hyperbolic, ultra-dramatic Gainsborough of a farmer crossing a bridge in a deep, dark valley, an explosive Turner vision of a misty sunset and neat little Constable prints of the four seasons. This is the English landscape. It’s quiet, calm, verdant. Almost utopian.
But we all know that’s only part of the picture. Stunning photos of the industrial north west by Chris Killip show a miserable nation torn apart by poverty and terrible weather. Staged images by Jo Spence find her face down and naked in a field as a murdered trespasser or a rebellious land rights protester. The English landscape is a fractured, contested place.
It’s quiet, calm, verdant. Almost utopian.
It’s also not just English. British artist Hurvin Anderson paints patterns from the ironwork gates around homes in his parents’ Jamaica, Anthea Hamilton makes a kimono patterned with British grasses, Jeremy Deller creates a motorway sign for the A303 headed to ‘Built By Immigrants’. The English landscape is a constructed space, one built by countless people from countless places.
It can still be bucolic and idyllic, but in a different way. Just look at Derek Jarman’s gorgeous Prospect Cottage on the Kent shingle in the shadow of a nuclear power station, represented here in notebooks, video and sculpture. The landscape now becomes an escape, a place of calm and purpose and freedom and quiet contemplation, but always haunted by the spectre of modernity in some way.
The green, pleasant England of Gainsborough, Constable and Turner seems to be long gone, and maybe the messy truth that replaced it is somehow even more beautiful.