Output details

'A Quiet Companion': 10 paintings and 10 works on paper (see supporting portfolio for details) first shown at Campden Gallery, Gloucestershire in 2010; the exhibition was accompanied by a folded card publication containing a text by Fisher and 6 colour illustrations.

This practice-based research built on understanding of narratives of landscape developed in previous research. Images with accumulated, layered information and sequences of landscape were examined and compared through the making of ten paintings and ten works on paper. These works explored the potential of a painting or succession of paintings to explore themes of moving from one place, time or idea to another.

Further study of landscape in the poetry of John Clare informed the work. Each individual painting in the sequence of works on paper makes reference to a place that Clare experienced. In this way, the series of paintings, seen in sequence, sought to present a visual echo of the narrative of place in Clare: aspects of Clare’s movement through the landscape, his relationship with it, and his internal experience of loss and estrangement are interpreted through the interaction of one painting in the sequence with the next.

The visual effect of enclosure, as described in John Barrel’s ‘The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place’ was instructive in making visual representations of movement through landscape. The geometric grid of fences used to divide landscape changes the territory that Clare remembered from one characterised by boundless horizons and a rounded structure, into one compartmentalised and rectilinear.

In the ten paintings, networks of branches were deployed to describe this passage from one status to another. Formally, this suggested a visual pattern of landscape between the organic and circular space of Clare’s childhood and the rectilinear rigidity of enclosure, thereby describing a movement between the two positions.

In depicting a figure moving through such a mesh, or away from it, these paintings suggested new possibilities for reading Clare, and contributed to dialogue concerning the human position in landscape, authorship, audience location, and figure-ground relationships in contemporary painting.