Terrain: Land into Art

Hestercombe Gallery is proud to present a new exhibition Terrain: Land into Art, bringing together 17 artists who make artworks that respond to the natural world.

The show features a series of works from modernism to the present day. Artists include Peter Doig, Kathy Prendergast, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Anya Gallaccio and Simon Faithfull alongside more recent works by Gary Hume, John Stezaker, Vicken Parsons, Raphael Hefti and Tim Knowles.

Set within Hestercombe’s rolling landscape the exhibition focuses very much on the ground beneath our feet rather than looking towards horizons. Drawing together abstract and figurative works – through film, photography, sculpture, painting and texts – this exhibition wonders at how we cast our relationships with landscape. How do we navigate, contend with and adapt to physical and metaphorical terrains? From the context of a gallery set within rural Somerset, Terrain ponders what it means to be a part of, or apart from, or just to pass through, landscapes.

The exhibition maps a series of relationships between artists and landscapes. Passage through landscape is the subject of Hamish Fulton, Tim Knowles and Richard Long, for whom walking is key. Movement through nature also features in Rachel Lowe and Roger Ackling’s work. Whilst Emma Kay and Kabir Hussain take a wide-angle bird’s-eye-view of terrain, rendered either from memory or viewed from an aeroplane. Simon Faithfull also draws away from terrain with his footage of land viewed through a small weather balloon as it moves ever further into space.

The work of Nerys Johnson, Turner Prize nominated Gillian Carnegie and Anya Gallaccio is clustered around the passing of time as manifested through nature. In John Stezaker’s hands terrain appears more explicitly as metaphor for the inner mind. Gary Hume and Vicken Parsons’s work, when viewed together, resembles an empty stage, an imaginary terrain yet to be inhabited, with Hume’s glossy brash deconstructed segments of a rainbow hovering above Parsons’s scuffed and muted small scale objects.

Historian Simon Schama believes that ‘before it can be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’. With that in mind, ’Terrain’ picks a path through a series of physical and mental encounters with the earth’s surface.

The exhibition runs from 19th March until 3rd July 2016.