The New Landscape

Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro   17/1/09 - 14/3/09

Installation shot

L to R: Andy Hughes, Daryl Waller, Rupert White

Detail: Paul Chaney

L to R: Alison Sharkey, Andy Hughes, Daryl Waller, Bruce Davies

Andy Hughes

L to R: Ian Brown, Paul Chaney, Ben Cook

L to R: Patrick Shanahan, Rupert White, Ian Whitford

Detail: Alison Sharkey

Nigel Ayers

List of works (written for museum labels)

Nigel Ayers   Ecnad Larolf, 2009

Ecnad Larolf is a multimedia work constructed around a three minute recording of Helston Town Band playing the Floral Dance, which has been digitally time-stretched so that it is more than an hour long. Emanating from artificial-looking grassy knolls, the resulting sound follows a beat that seems closer to the earth breathing, or the cycles of plants, than a traditional processional dance beat.

Paul Chaney   The Eathorne Stone (2006)

Ian Brown     Hogweed (Cornwall), 2006, Loe Bar (Cornwall), 2007

Ian Brown’s landscape images are made by superimposing several photographs of the same place taken from slightly different view points, typically eg as points along a  path. The results convey a sense of the artist moving through the space, whilst simultaneously referring to a tradition of landscape painting.

Ben Cook    Field, 2006

‘Field’ is one of a large series of work made by Ben Cook in which surf-board technology (here waxed and polished fibreglass) is used to make an image of a seascape as if viewed from a beach. Cook asks us to consider the cultural meaning of surfing, and its relation to art.

Paul Chaney    SW774318, 2009

'SW774318', draws attention to the complex, and often personal narratives, which are attached to landscape. The sculpture, sealed in a gallery vitrine, is an intricate scale model of the landscape.  This is far from an idyllic view, rather we have a macabre, slightly sinister scene of stacked crates and a hanging man. 

Rupert White      Tree-form, 2008     

Modernist abstract art from the last century was often constructed from geometric forms like squares and circles. This concern with perfect form is satirised in ‘Tree-form’ in which the bends and twists of a branch are made into a series of right angles.

Patrick Shanahan      Child’s Grave, United Downs, 2008,   Tailing’s Dam, Goongumpus  2007

Patrick Shanahan photographs forgotten and neglected corners of Cornwall. Usually absent of people, these enigmatic scenes have a tranquil but melancholy quality in which narratives and stories are told by means of the objects that have been left behind in them.

Rupert White       Line made by walking (landfill), 2007

‘Line made by walking’ is a remake of an early work by celebrated Land Artist, Richard Long. Rupert White’s version of the work takes on a different meaning by virtue of the fact that it was made on a site used for landfill at United Downs.

Ian Whitford      The Captains Triptych, 2008

The Captains Triptych are three films all inspired by The Captains Cottage, a Cornish cottage outside Zennor that is now a holiday home. Whilst it is left unclear who or what is in the coffin that is dragged by the artist to the church at Zennor, there is an implication he represents the last inhabitant of the community that once lived there. (shown originally as part of BOS08)

Andy Hughes       Porthmeor Beach (no. 104), Gwithian Beach (no. 179), Gwithian Beach (no.79) from Dominant Wave Theory

‘Dominant Wave Theory’ by Andy Hughes is a collection of photographs that was published as a book of the same name in 2006. The collection features pictures of rubbish washed up by the tide on beaches in Cornwall, and elsewhere in Europe and America. Although colourful and seductive as images, these impromptu still lives also speak of the waste and excesses of post-industrial societies.

Daryl Waller    Coca-cola tap (2005)

Daryl Waller is a multi-media artist, whose work is centred on drawing. Although international brand-names and corporations have come later to Cornwall than to most parts of the UK, this work is a playful reminder of the way in they are increasingly dominating our lifestyles.

Rupert White    Still (2007)

‘Still’ is a sculpture in which a museum plinth and plinth case, instead of being used to house a conventional art-work, are here making drinking water (using salt water from the Truro River) via a simple process of evaporation. Such devices are highly necessary in parts of the developing world, though the work is also intended to refer to notions of spiritual purification.

Alison Sharkey     Menhir 1&2 (2007

An ancient menhir (standing stone) standing close to Goonhilly satellite station’s perimeter fence was enshrouded in several meters of satin cut in the jagged modernist pattern known as ‘Dazzle’ camouflage.  A fake menhir placed in an adjacent field drew in passers-by perplexed by the appearance of a standing stone where previously there had been none.  Alison Sharkey’s work explores unexpected encounters, the playful and the absurd (made originally for ‘Happidrome One’: part of MORE Cornwall).

Andy Hughes       Hermosa Beach, Los Angeles (no.5) (2006)

‘Dominant Wave Theory’ by Andy Hughes is a collection of photographs that was published as a book of the same name in 2006. The collection features pictures of rubbish washed up by the tide on beaches in Cornwall, and elsewhere in Europe and America. Although colourful and seductive, these impromptu still lives also speak of the waste and excesses of post-industrial societies.

Daryl Waller     Happy? (2007)

Happy? was one of a series of unannounced and unofficial interventions made by a artists across Cornwall as part of Tales of the Unexpected. The locations included out-of-town shops, cliff-sides and the Tate in St Ives.  In this case Waller projected a drawn image of a skull onto a wall in a housing estate in Truro. This shining memento mori was visible for a couple of hours to all passing cars.

Bruce Davies    CUT/STACK/BURN (2007)

Furze (dried gorse) was cut from heath land sites on the Lizard and West Penwith from December to February 2007 by people from local communities and the National Trust as part of the existing land management for these areas. The harvest was then bound into faggots and stacked to dry in ricks at Coverack and Morvah. The faggots were transported to a hillside site at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens Penzance where they were laid out into a large circular construction that took reference from industrial fuel storage. The work was destroyed by fire at 6.00pm on the eve of British summer time, 25^th of March 2007. This stage of the project was intended to highlight our estrangement from the need and means to acquire our own energy at first hand.

Ben Cook   Beach (2006)

Beach is a minimalist art-work made from neoprene, a modern fabric used to make wetsuits. It is another work in the series inspired by his interest in the semiotics of surfing. Its areas of brutally flat colour seem to drain the sentiment and cliché from of the image of the beach traditionally so beloved by commercial painters from Cornwall.

see 'features' for an essay on the show by Harriet Hawkins