Salt Island

 Mónica de Miranda, Salt Island, 2022 (detail)

I recently went to look around RE/SISTERS A Lens on Gender and Ecology, at the Barbican. In this exhibition the politics goes well beyond environmentalism and feminism, encompassing work that reflects on sexuality, race and the history of colonialism. And yet it would be possible in some cases to wilfully ignore all these strata of meaning and admire a work as landscape art, like Salt Island, a sequence of five photographs embroidered with green thread. We are told by the wall label that Mónica de Miranda's work 'considers the complex experience of Afrodiasporic lives and Europe's colonialist past through a Black ecofeminist lens, drawing on ideas of matrilineal relationships, kinship, migration, slavery and African liberation movements.' However it's hard to get all this from Salt Island and the exhibition would ideally have displayed more of the multimedia project of which this is just a part, The Island. There is a good description of this in a text by Ana Nolasco on the artist's website, including historical background on the “Ilha dos Pretos” (Island of Blacks) which inspired it - stories of an eighteenth century settlement of people of African origin by the Sado River. 

 

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, 1982

The addition of new ways of understanding our relationship with the planet make it increasingly hard to position art in this field. Agnes Denes, for example, is included for her famous Manhattan Wheatfield project, but she is now being criticised for using wheat, a Eurocolonial industrial cereal crop, 'implicated in the displacement of Indigenous people and indigenous plants over much of the continent for at least two centuries' (Catriona Sandilands). Today, artists need to think intersectionally. They have to create arresting work while steering (if I can use a mythological gendered landscape metaphor) between the Scylla of 'Mother Earth' attitudes, that equate women too closely with nature, and the Charybdis of panoramic or abstracting viewpoints, associated with power and possession

Back in 1986, Tee A. Corinne's Isis photomontages placed vulvas in the landscape of Oregon. Did this go too far in equating the female body with nature? Context is important: Corinne is well known for her books and images celebrating lesbian lives and these 'landscapes' were just one small project in a prolific lifetime's work. It is hard to criticise artists like Corinne, Ana Mendieta, Laura Aguilar and others for positioning themselves as part of their environments, as an alternative to the disembodied vistas of landscape painters or large-scale interventions of land artists. They were 'performing ground' - locating 'the self not merely in the world but of it' (Lucy Bradnock). Writing about Corinne's work, Tamsin Wilton argues that her 'celebration of woman in the woodland focuses on women's sexuality, the seat of female sexual pleasure. In other words, precisely what is most often erased in the women-as-landscape genre.' 

Symrin Gill's aerial photographs of open-pit mines can be seen as avoiding the industrial sublime by 'alluding to the corporeal' (the series is called Eyes and Storms), emphasising the landscape's 'bodily textures' by allowing shadows to disrupt a two-dimensional 'extractivist viewpoint.' By contrast, Sim Chi Yin does provide a beautiful abstract aerial view (below) as part of her Shifting Sands project. But this aestheticisation of the 'infrastructural' gaze' is juxtaposed with other photographs ('the human gaze') that show the impact of erosion in poorer areas of the Global South. Another artist, Mary Mattingly is represented by some striking unpeopled 2016 photographs: Mineral Seep, where a cliff is transformed into a drip painting by black and brown stains, and Ore Transport, where an uncanny, unfathomable concrete structure, framed by grey water and pale sky, draws you into its shadowy interior. But these too are contextualised with a chalk board Cobalt Map showing the complex system that supports its production and distribution, 'a network of violence that percolates outward from the original site of extraction.'

Sim Chi Yin, Shifting Sands #2, 2017-ongoing

The Gardens of Fontainebleau

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Forest of Fontainebleau, 1868

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Forest of Fontainebleau has a special place in the history of western landscape art: painted repeatedly by the Barbizon School and the Impressionists who took inspiration from them.  That there is still a forest to explore is down in part to Théodore Rousseau: he 'appealed to Napoleon III to halt the wholesale destruction of the forest’s trees, and in 1853 the emperor established a preserve to protect the artists’ cherished giant oaks' (see the Met's online essay on the Barbizon School).  We were in Fontainebleau on that fiercely hot weekend earlier this month and I yearned to head into the forest to find some of that deep shade painted by Rousseau's friend Narcisse Virgilio Díaz.  But we'd come for culture rather than nature, to visit the Château de Fontainebleau.  Emerging from its opulent rooms in the full heat of the afternoon we made our way across the Grand Parterre, with its low hedges and topiary cones stretching into the distance.  This flat, mathematical space, planned out by André Le Nôtre and Louis Le Vau, is as different a landscape as can be imagined from the dense wooded slopes and tenebrous clearings explored by the Barbizon painters.  Strange then to find at its centre, beneath the surface of a square ornamental pool, a miniature forest, swaying gently in the cool, clear water. 
 

Before the Barbizon School there was the School of Fontainebleau, two schools in fact, the first comprising artists brought to decorate the palace during the sixteenth century (including Benvenuto Cellini, who describes the work in his wonderfully vivid Autobiography), the second at the beginning of the seventeenth during one of the phases of renovation and redecoration that continued down to Napoleon's time.  These Mannerist artists were much more interested in mythological figures and allegorical references than in anything to do with landscape, as can be seen in the print below, where a rocky scene is completely dominated by its framing figures. There are numerous references to hunting in their decorative schemes: the forest as resource for the king's pleasure.  The Palace contains a Gallery of Diana and a Gallery of Stags.  There is also a Jardin de Diane, with a fountain dating from the early nineteenth century dedicated to the goddess; its water comes from the mouths of stags and, as my son's were quick to point out, four "pissing dogs". 

Antonio Fantuzzi, Cartouche with male and female satyrs

carrying baskets and flanking a rocky landscape, 1543

Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

Tommaso Francini, The Château and Gardens, early 17th century

 Source: Wikimedia Commons

  

One of the Valois Tapestries, showing a festival on the lake at Fontainebleau, 

made shortly after 1580.

The Carp Lake visible in the seventeenth century plan shown above is still there (as are the carp).  The photograph of it below was taken from a rowing boat that I was pressed into hiring.  The lake at Fontainebleau can also be seen in one of the Valois Tapestries, made to commemorate eight of Catherine de' Medici's famous court festivals.  This one took place in 1564 and was just one event in the royal progress that took her and her son, the new king, two and a half years to complete.  The household accompanying them included her 'flying squadron' (L'escadron volant) of eighty seductive ladies-in-waiting, and nine dwarfs who travelled in their own miniature coaches.  The great poet Pierre de Ronsard was present at Fontainebleau, where there were feasts, jousts, sirens singing, Neptune floating in his chariot and an attack on an enchanted island.  I wonder how many of them thought about the real forest beyond the Château as they acted out imaginary battles in an artificial landscape.  A century later the island in the lake was given a small pavilion; later it was restored by Napoleon.  We were warned as we climbed into the boat not to row too close it, although I don't think our inept collective efforts at steering could have got us there anyway.

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef

Strange underwater landscapes are currently on display at the South Bank - the Institute for Figuring have brought their hyperbolic crochet coral reef project to England:

'The IFF reef has been inspired by the principles of hyperbolic crochet originally developed by mathematician Dr Daina Taimina. In 1997 Dr Taimina discovered how to make models of the geometry known as hyperbolic space using the feminine art of crochet. Until that time most mathematicians had believed it was impossible to construct physical models of hyperbolic forms, yet nature had been doing just that for hundreds of millions of years. It turns out that many marine organisms embody hyperbolic geometry, among them kelps, corals, sponges and nudibranchs. The IFF reef not only looks like an actual coral reef, it draws on the same underlying geometry endemic in the oceanic realm... Over the past two years, through increasingly freeform experimentation, we have discovered that tiny changes in the underlying crochet algorithms will result in major changes to the resulting forms. By exploiting this insight we have gradually evolved a wide taxonomy of hyperbolic crochet “species.” To our surprise, the range of possible forms seems to be endless, yet they all result from extremely simple instruction sets. Just as the teeming variety of living species on earth result from different versions of the DNA-based genetic code, so too a huge range of crochet hyperbolic species have been brought into being through minor modifications to the underlying code. As time progresses the models have “evolved” from the simple purity of Dr Taimina’s mathematically precise algorithms to more complex aberrations that invoke ever more naturalistic forms.'

The London reef exhibition is in two parts. The Hayward Gallery shows some of the earlier works from this project: 'the Bleached Reef, a new configuration of the Ladies Silurian Reef, the beautifully archaic Branched Anemone Garden, and the ever-growing Toxic Reef... the wondrously surreal Chicago Cambrian Reef (curated by IFF contributor Aviva Alter), plus a new formation of the Beaded Reef by master beaders Rebecca Peapples and Sue Von Ohlsen, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable Reef (with hot-pink sand by Kathleen Greco), and the Bottle Tree Grove (featuring works by Christine Wertheim, Evelyn Hardin and Nadia Severns)'. The Royal Festival Hall has a display of reefs made by UK crafters (see photograph above). Mrs Plinius, who is a dab hand with the needles, was one of the contributors.

This is Lagos

This is Lagos (2002) by Olu Amoda - welded scrap steel.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to include a few more images in 'Some Landscapes'. The one above is, I have to admit, a rather inauspicious start: a murky snapshot of some metal on a table, framed by lumps of coal. It was taken at the V&A's 'Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft' exhibition yesterday. Normally I don't have images of contemporary art works for copyright reasons but nobody seemed to mind photographs being taken at the V&A. This is Lagos is a metal cityscape seen from above, where it is impossible to discern what is signified by each of the individual scraps of metal, or what they originally were before the artist found them. I thought the way Amoda creates a semi-abstract topography was reminiscent of Anne Wilson's piece earlier in the exhibition, which can be seen in another poor quality photo below. Some of her arrangements of lace and pins look like winter trees in a snowy landscape, whilst other features are more mysterious. There is a better photograph of a 2002 version of Topologies here.

Topologies (2007) by Anne Wilson - lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support.

Of course craft is by definition skillful, but it can still be surprising to encounter really intricate beauty or objects you would not have thought possible. Annie Cattrell's Conditions for example, (see third and least-bad photo below) seem to imprison real clouds in blocks of glass. I wonder what John Constable, some of whose cloud studies are owned by the V&A, would have made of them? I suppose one difference is that he wanted to capture the whole sky rather than an individual cloud, as in a 5 September 1822 sketch: "looking S.E. noon. Wind very brisk. & effect bright & fresh. Clouds. moving very fast. With occasional very bright openings to the blue."

Conditions (2006) by Annie Cattrell - subsurface etching in glass

So, as I said, I will try to put some more images into this blog in 2008, and maybe add a few retrospectively to earlier postings. I'll also try to provide more labels to help navigate certain themes and find quickly the entries on some key figures (like Constable - see label below). And at some point I'll get round to adding links and a decent blog roll...

Brighton in stitches

In a new exhibition, Running Stitch, Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton are 're-configuring Brighton & Hove by 'capturing' its space through the movement of its inhabitants'. Visitors are given a special mobile phone that tracks their movements and allow their paths through the city to be 'projected live in the gallery to disclose aspects of the city unknown to the artists. Each individual route will then be sewn into a hanging canvas to form an evolving tapestry that reveals a sense of place and interconnection.'

It will be interesting to see a tapestry mapping the sort of places favoured by the kind of people that visit Brighton's Fabrica gallery. However, when I saw it this afternoon, the pattern of stitches was already starting to look like conventional maps of the city. I was hoping visitors would deliberately subvert the city's network of main roads and shops, or employ the kind of chance procedures used in situationist dérives. So will Brighton be re-configured or end up stitched in a conventional pattern? We'll probably know before the exhibition finishes on 17 December.

The gardens at Stoke Edith

William Sheldon set up a tapestry workshop in his manor house at Barcheston in 1570 with the aim of starting a local industry to rival the tapestry makers of Flanders. The Sheldon tapestry workshop produced maps of English counties: this detail of the map of Warwickshire shows the Sheldon house at Weston (above the windmill). The V&A has a fragment showing what is now South West London. They are charming to look at (Horace Walpole thought so when he bought them in 1781), although landscape elements are admittedly fairly limited. Whilst none of the other Sheldon workshop tapestries in the V&A depict pure landscapes, they are all rich in natural detail, like the verdure in a tapestry of Paris giving the golden apple, and the rural settings of a tapestry showing a huntsman and a valance with country scenes.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Another type of landscape-related tapestry at the V&A is the Stoke Edith embroidery (above), showing the formal gardens of a house in Herefordshire. There is a wonderfully gushing description of it here.

The V&A currently have a textile artist in residence, Sue Lawty, who draws inspiration from landscape and natural materials, e.g. Terra (2004). She has recently begun making stone drawings – collages of stone suspended on the wall which resemble tapestries, one of which is currently on display. You can follow her progress on her blog.

Update May 2015
Looking back at this post I see most of the V&A links no longer work, leaving it a bit threadbare.  So I'll add in here something on another of the Sheldon maps I read recently, intrigued by the headline 'Map of Worcestershire from 1590s describes mysterious event in the hills near ‘The Worldesend’.

'A 400-year-old tapestry map that depicts a mysterious event that happened among the villages, streams and windmills of Elizabethan Worcestershire is to go on public display for the first time in centuries at Oxford’s Bodleian library.  Exactly what happened, somewhere north of Kynaston and south of Edgbaston, in the 1590s remains a mystery, but the tapestry’s woven text is emphatic: the hilly landscape, near a village ominously named as “The Worldesend”, “was dryven downe by the removyng of the ground”.  “Earthquake? Landslide? Quarrying? We just don’t know,” says Nick Millea, map librarian at the Bodleian. “It’s one of the many things in this map I’d love to follow up one day.” ... The mysterious “dryven downe” land is unlikely to be invention. Given that it was made when few people had ever seen even a paper map – Millea says that Sheldon would certainly have had to explain to most visitors what a map was and how to read it – the glowing landscape is remarkably accurate. ... One of its many delights is the text: one section says, of a county still famous for its orchards: “hear goodly orchards planted are in fruite which doo abounde. Thine eye wolde make thin hart rejoyce to see so pleasant grounde.”'
 

Landscape with Apollo killing the Cyclops

Domenichino and assistants, Apollo Killing the Cyclops, c. 1616-18

There are eight frescoes designed by Domenichino (1581-1641) in the National Gallery, all showing scenes from mythology set in classical landscapes. They originally decorated a garden pavilion at the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, built in 1615 as the rural retreat of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini. They fall into the Roman and Renaissance tradition of landscape frescoes: realistic depictions of idealised versions of the real countryside surrounding the villa. However, these frescoes have an interesting further layer of complexity: they are actually trompe l’oeil depictions of tapestries, as can be seen clearly in Apollo killing the Cyclops, where the tapestry is lifted up at one corner and the bars of a window can be seen behind the leg of the cardinal’s dwarf. So in Aldobrandini’s garden pavilion, the real landscape was behind a wall, behind a fake window, behind a fake tapestry and behind a landscape that never really existed.

 Apollo and Neptune advising Laomedon on the Building of Troy

The spring of Khosrow

Looking at images of a carpet at Sacramento Airport by Seyed Alavi, with its design showing satellite views of the Sacremento River, reminded me that one of the most famous of all carpets was made to illustrate a landscape. This was The Spring of Khosrow, a vast silk Persian carpet (84 x 35ft) depicting a royal garden. According to Penelope Hobhouse ( in The History of Gardening), it “used golden threads to represent the earth, shimmering crystal for the rills, and pearls for the gravel paths. Fruit trees in the geometric plots had trunks and branches shaped in silver and gold with precious stones representing flowers and fruit.”  It was also known as The Winter Carpet because it could be used when the weather was too bad to experience real gardens.  Sadly in 637, when the invading Arab army found the carpet at Ctesiphon, they cut it up and divided the pieces among themselves. However, the tradition of depicting gardens on Persian carpets has continued.