Exquisite Landscapes

Show Statement

Rivermead Gallery, Rivermead Campus, Chelmsford.

March 14th - 15th April 2011

‘Exquisite Landscapes’ is a development of ‘cadavre exquis’ which was a word and pictorial game played by the surrealist artists from the 1920’s onward (see references in display cabinet for more information). Basically the aim of the game was to construct a ‘body’ collaboratively, each participant substituting for a body part another image, without seeing the contribution of the other participants. It appealed to the surrealist artists and poets because surprising images and texts could be produced, conducive to encouraging the type of creative freedom valued by this group. ‘Exquisite Landscapes’ involves substituting the landscape for the body, and in ways related to the surrealists aims, creating collaborative images of various kinds that evoke fractured landscape derived from partially glimpsed images made by other collaborators. Interestingly Andre Breton a poet and major promoter of the surrealist movement, produced a collage ‘Chapeaux de gaze garnis de blonde (1934)’ which is a landscape that relates to the ‘exquisite corpse’ experiments.

I will describe the work as it appears in the gallery from this point onwards (clockwise).

This first piece is a coloured drawing by Alan Thornton called ‘Exquisite Landscape’ which introduces the exhibition. Although the four segments of landscape that feature were constantly visible to the artists a degree of spontaneous choice was made in bringing them together.
These are a series of oil pastel drawings made by PGCE students from the Faculty of Education, training to be secondary art teachers. Each student was asked to choose from a number of images of landscapes (photographs of landscape and postcards of artists’ pictures of landscapes) and copy sections of sky (top) followed by sections of horizons (middle) and finally sections of foreground (bottom). Each student produced four different sections on four different folded sheets of paper and could not see the previous drawing because of the way in which the paper was folded.
These are three paintings by Alan Thornton developing personal sequences of four sections of landscape based on the theme.
As in 2.
These display cabinets contain references and influences regarding the theme. In particular I draw your attention to an image/collage by Peter Wilson which is a fine example of an ‘Exquisite Landscape’ that preceded the work in this exhibition.
These are three collaborative poems based on the landscape by Alan Thornton and Peter Wilson. Seven stanzas’ with seven lines and seven words per line is the basic form. The stanzas’ alternate between the participants who only saw the last line of the previous stanza before creating their own.
The three chalk pastel drawings of landscape, in four sections, were created through collaborations between Alan Thornton and two of his grandchildren, George and Phoebe Stephenson and the daughter of a friend, Megan Smalley. Each participant drew two alternating sections each whilst the developing drawing was in full view.

The two installations between the large drawings on this wall are based on the landscape and were created by Tom Scott. His own words on these follow.

North, South, East, West Walthamstow Marshes: Audio. This work was made to responses to the environs of the marsh at Walthamstow during the summer of 2010, expressed through the audio narratives.
Postcard View, St Mary’s Island: Super 8, Digital, Installation. This project has been developed from a series of works investigating the landscapes of the east coast of England. Walthamstow Marshes, Malden, Essex, Gibraltar Point, Lincolnshire and St Mary’s Island, North Tyneside. In this case - light, texture and wind movement are important aspects of this work. Shot with Super 8 film, using time lapse and digitally looped; this presentation creates a more focused viewpoint of the observed landscape.

Alan Thornton, Faculty of Education, alan.thornton@anglia.ac.uk

Tom Scott.

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