Elson, Verity & Shirley, Rosemary, (2017) Creating the Countryside. FROM: Creating the countryside the rural idyll . pp.13-41

I was fortunate to be taken round the exhibition by Rosemary Shirley and to have the opportunity to ask questions, a couple of months later I met Verity Elson when I was with Rosemary at the exhibition This Land is Our Land at Hauser and Wirth in Somerset, the fact that these survey shows about the countryside/land/rural is, in itself a question as to why there is a desire to make a public commentary about the way we used to live, which is a very popular theme with the general public, it goes beyond nostalgia but makes direct observations about ownership, marginalization, greed, alternative lifestyles, animals, plants, people, consumerism, folklore, everything that forms human existence. Does this popular theme when deconstructed hope to give answers about how to reconnect? links with the Soper text     

The text offered up lots of questions as well as observations linking concepts to my own work. I was particularly interested in the Claude glass, which is a beautiful object, but raised questions about framing the landscape as well as looking into a screen/frame/lens to get the most aesthetic/picturesque view and how that relates to smart phones and digital cameras. For many people their only memory of a location is through a lens, therefore not actually seeing what is in front of them (so many questions)

Separation and Observation central to the concept of landscape pg15

When discussing Paul Reas’s work Flogging a Dead Horse: Constable country, Faltford Mill, Suffolk ‘the multi-layered framing of the countryside – as a landscape painting, as a tourist experience and finally in the work of Reas himself – offers a critique of the heritage industry by exploring the tension between imagination and experience in the search for the perfect view pg 16 

This quote resonates on two layers, firstly when I thought I would make paintings by locating the sites Ivon Hitchens painted from, but having located his viewpoints (which was interesting) I felt no sense of place and secondly, looking at how the SDNP markets itself and the tourist experience through text and images, drawing on the rural idyll.

Just as the shepherd of the classical pastoral tradition had offered a glimpse into a timeless world, so the image of the rural labourer became imbued with the ideals of the harmony of a pre-industrial Golden Age –

what is interesting is the 150 year time difference, a time-frame between an industrial and the pastoral which creates a nostalgia and a feeling of safety, the idea that anxiety is played out through images of the countryside is interesting and takes me back to the start about there being a proliferation of exhibitions about the countryside, could this be an anxiety about digital/global/social media in comparison to industrialization (Trump and the steel industry)

My new body of work Lost is a modern-day take on William Collins painting Rustic Civility, in the text it is stated that during this period in history,1833 the painting provided an idea of a stable social hierarchy, particularly for aristocratic and wealthy industrialists. Whereas my work is more covert, the social hierarchies are more complex, people don’t tug their forelocks, but they are made to feel their place though social positioning and entitlement. pg19

Raymond Williams (Read more) on the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue’, then goes on to add that ‘Powerful hostile associations have also developed...on the country as a place of backwards, ignorance, limitation’ this statement pg36 leans towards popular culture, but I would also include how local knowledge was overruled through mass production and financial gain.

pg 37 The more village communities are dispersed, as old families die out and descendants cannot afford to live in houses whose prices have been inflated by middle-class aspirational living, and as connections to the past are lost, the more fervently traditions are enacted, revived and invented This piece of text really hit a nerve, both with my politics and the work I make. Val Williams, in the same piece of text writes about Anna Fox’s work ‘these creations, so badly made, so menacing, are ideal subjects for Fox’s continuing survey of village life, asserting, as they do, the importance of custom, yet at the same time illustrating its degradation’