This picture, which I saw yesterday at the Lisson Gallery in London, appears to show a mountain landscape. However, it is actually a byproduct of a more ambitious work of landscape art that I saw last November at the Barbican: Lucy Raven's film Murderers Bar(2025). I have written here before about art addressing the environmental impacts of dams; this film does the opposite - celebrating the undamming of the Klamath River in Northern California. At the Barbican I arrived at just the right time to watch drone footage of the wider landscape and workers laying dynamite. Then, the loud detonation arrives making you jump (I stayed to watch it again and managed to film it on my phone - see below). The beauty of the film really becomes apparent as her camera follows the wave of water flooding through miles of the old river valley, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. 'The film then follows the river back upstream through the drained reservoir, a stark terrain of sediment cut by the new path of the river that will be transformed by life in years to come. The original drowned landscape is now revealed as potential'.
At the Lisson Gallery (until the end of this month) there are three Deposition panels and a video piece showing the water and mud from which gave rise to them. What they are is prints that reveal part of the working process behind the film. 'By constructing a large steel and wooden channel lined with expanses of silk, Raven staged smaller-scale floods and dam breaches in a studio environment, before revealing the aftermath, traced as sedimentary imprints or chance echoes on fabric sidewalls.' The resulting images are made of the same raw materials - sand, mud, cement, salt water - that she filmed at the Klamath River, but they bear no visual link to the landscape. The way they relate to the main film reminded me of the sketches artists used to make in preparing for major landscape paintings, or the documentary material assembled and exhibited by land artists. Murderers Bar itself is also only a part of a whole, as it represents the final installment of Raven's series The Drumfire. As an ArtReview article explains, this this focuses 'on how the landscape’s natural materials are placed under pressure, broken apart, reconstituted.' Earlier videos feature mining in Idaho and military detonations in New Mexico. You can see her talk about all this in a short film, Pressure & Release, at Art 21.
