The Naked Landscape

Tilted Arc, Richard Serra, 1981, sculpture, steel, New York City (destroyed). Photo 1985 David Aschkenas.

When Thomas Elsaesser delivered a lecture in Athens called Walter Benjamin, Global Cities and Living With Asymmetries during the Biennial before it closed with the party in 2011, I left there wondering why no one is looking at the heated cultural climate in the UK and what the heck asymmetries meant. The olympics had a cultural passivity which revisited me back to Elessers overall rift in his lecture which i will discuss at the end of this.  

Eric Bridgeman NO DIRECTION

Eric Bridgeman, Interview with Rose Parish 2012

You’ve been in Liverpool for nearly three months now, how has the landscape effected and composed your work and practice?

Along we go

Touch Down. Wizard of Oz. Dark Concrete roads and deserted streets. Different. Contrast. Other world. Farthest We've ever gone. Pick up. Back to reality. hanging on the edge. what to do. intense blue sky. boiling concrete. hoovering the streets. expensive. how much!. driving out of the city. just like a trip to North Wales. lost as night sets in. A to B and nothing in between. smooth roads. dry. hot. where to camp. off-road. air conditioning. vital. beer or wine. no fridge. 10 dollar tent. swimming in the sea. the ultimate refreshment. rip tide. waves too powerful. walking. walking. how far do we drive. dry light brown dirt. deserted city streets. not old. new. team work. who's cook tonight. decisions. it's getting dark. you've taken this long to cook it, so take your time to eat it. in and out of radio reception. triple j conversation starters. walking on sand, not jogging. a bloody long way. what's for lunch.  Kookaburra keeping a watchful eye. surrounded by bush. a black shape bounds across the road in front. good times in Albany. North is South and south is North. End of the line. edge of the world. what beer's good here. how much for a cd!? the long drive back. don't break down. hunting out the music and make the effort. we don't stick out anymore. blend in. a different way of doing things. how long since we wrote in our diaries. cooking on the camp fire stove. get on with it. it's getting dark. deserted beaches.  

Gerry - Gus Van Sant

PJ Harvey - The Last Living Rose

Nighthawks

Jilted City: bits of Jensen Wilder

Interview 9/8/2012

What is it about Patrick Mcguinesss jilted city that interested you?

Well I’d heard his name before, but I was in a bookshop in Heswall. He’d recently been there for a signing. There was a pretty girl behind the counter and I mentioned how was sorry I was to have missed him. She told me that there were still some signed copies. I'd looked through the copies on the shelf and none were signed. She told me he'd signed labels to stick into the books on purchase. I found that quite funny, I'm still not sure why.

What about his poetry?

Well, I liked the way he was responding to the memory of his mother. Place as well. I think his mother represented his home. Travelled around but she became 'home' to him. I enjoy exploring the idea of 'home', how someone can make you feel you're there.

Was there a particular poem that stood out?

No, even now I couldn’t quote anything from it the collection. I haven't had it that long. It’s the over arching themes I enjoy. I haven’t sunk my teeth into it. Poetry is like hard candy, you take your time with it. Some poets that are punchy and snappy, the best are to be savoured.

What do you think 'jilted city' means?

I think it means leaving the marriage of place behind. I think he's very bound up in places, I think he sees them as relationships. He seems like he's in a restless state, leaving the place where he is to move into his memories. Like jilting someone at the alter. The idea of home for him is slowly becoming memory, you have to forget/withdraw from where you are in order to recover memory; to return home. You jilt anything you give up on.

What does it mean to you?

This idea of jilting a place where you are in favour of another is one of my themes. Life themes, I mean. I left Liverpool, the place I first made love, the place I made memories… it was a relationship. I went to study in Bath and excommunicated myself from Liverpool. I had this feeling I'd never return to Liverpool. So, thinking back, I connected my sadness’s with the place, to give myself the excuse not to look back.

I was in Bath for 5 years. I had manic patches, bouts of depression. I connected to Bath like a new love and when that love went sour, when I had my last mental break-down, I came back. So I jilted Bath, like I had before. I was so depressed, I didn’t think I deserved to live down there. So again it was a jilted love. Sometimes we don't leave because things have ended, we leave because we don't want to fight any more. We go into a coma.

Ultimately 'jilted' to me, is a forced exile however it comes about. Whether that is because things got bad, or you did, or they spurned you, or you just got nerves walked toward the bride.

What does the city at night mean to you?

“Caffeine is the fuel of the city by day, alcohol is the fuel of the city by night.” - 'Identikit Manchester, Mark Rainey..

The city at night means opportunity. Well no…. actually yeah. (laughs) the city comes alive at night. The people are a lot less inhabited. I think desire and camaraderie is elevated and accelerated. Men you’ve never met, who you knock into by accident, start a fight with you and then two seconds later they want to take you around with them and by you coke. And with women, desire is elevated, they're less inhibited. A lot of what people think is debauched behaviour, is so much more natural. The city at night to me is a landscape of impulse. It’s the hardest to capture. You can paint in the day because the landscape is lit up by the sun. Everything is there for the eye. But night… we can't see everything. The only light is signs advertising this or that activity. I think the most important thing to remember about the night is how much more we are in control of what is seen at night. If we don't want to see it, we don't illuminate it. It's a limited perspective in one sense and at the same time we're wholly in control of what is seen.

Jensen Wilder is a writer and poet based in Liverpool

http://la-voliere.tumblr.com/

Edward Hopper Nighthawks 1942

Breathing Space

Hiya

I've been meaning to write something about your work for a while Rose - here goes!

I encountered your work for the first time at your degree show exhibition at LJMU Art and Design Academy earlier this summer. It was a big group exhibition with each artist taking a portion of the space of the top floor of the building. You were displaying three paintings, but instead of just hanging them on a white wall, you had integrated other objects into how we viewed the works. One painting was surrounded by a much larger canvas stretcher, another one incorporated breeze blocks (I think!) and another.........aaargh, I've forgotten, sorry!

Anyway, the main idea was that you were showing objects alongside, with, and as part of your paintings. This meant that there was an expanded area of activity for the viewer to take in, when piecing together the work and what it might mean.

Within the work, you had a painting of a brick wall, but with slashes of a dark colour interrupting the more familiar brick pattern. Other pieces had more of a familiar landscape composition to them, with a horizon line leading the eye. But with each painting there was a different perspective explored, unsettling the viewer and asking us to question quite what we're looking at and why. The brick wall piece for example was upfront, there wasn't a narrative there that I detected, or if there was it is pretty abstract.

I could really do with a more prolonged time looking at these pieces, so I'll pop my head into your space when I'm next in the studio. It's a bit hazey at the moment, as to your degree show installation. But the first thing that definitely struck me as I looked at the paintings was the fact that you placed them in a more sculptural / object context, where their narratives can spill into the space.

This is something that I haven't really explored in my work, tending to focus on what's going on in the rectangle of the painting, as opposed to what's outside it. I guess I would start to consider a paintings object-ness when I come to exhibit it, but to actively go after that in the studio before exhibiting it something I probably wouldn't do.

How did you come to integrate objects in the installations with your paintings? Does the selection of objects evolve in parallel as you work on the painting?

For me to consider these more expanded interpretations of how painting and paintings can be viewed is good! That sounds a bit waffily, but I think it's great to have conversations with a painter thats pushing at the edges of the medium into new spaces, whereas with me I'm sort of wrestling with everything that goes into the rectangle (maybe you're the other way around!). Maybe the space outside of the canvas provides some breathing space! Maybe I should look there!

Before I ramble on for too long, I remembered you had the idea of pushing a painting into the corner. Was it to do with reflecting a mood or feeling? or a dejected object? I can't quite remember, but you said it was something you wanted to try out in a space. It seemed quite a simple action, but underpinned with an emotional significance of some sort (?). It seemed to chime with my ideas of exploring emotions in painting, but in quite a different, more direct way. Pinning your colours to the mast.

Before I go, I just thought I'd put down a few words capturing some of the moods of your paintings:

Grey skies, browns, bricks, drips here and there at the end of large brush marks and actions, light layers, weather, landscape, muddy colours but not a muddy painting, hints of trees, tears (as in ripping something apart) - we should put some images of your work up on the blog as well!

bye for now











 

Blog thoughts

Hi Rose,

I best get the ball rolling here and actually right something from my end!

I feel like this whole project is very much a learning curve for both of us. I think the starting point is a really great one, particularly the way you described it as a 'twinge' in both our practices. The challenge is to take that initial twinge and coax it along and help it form a coherent whole - much like painting!

The connection of landscape is definitely there between our practices, though we come at it from different directions. I guess this blog, and the process of this collaboration, is for us to learn more about our connection to landscape and how we deal with it. Like when we've had conversations in the studio, one of us might say one thing, but the other will say 'no, that's not the way I see it...' which is good!

The differences that I can think off so far are to do with:

- how we use photographay
- how we actually feed off / incorporate landscape into out work
-what landscapes we feed off.............

There will be loads more that I've forgotten, but I just thought I'd jot some off the top of my head....add to it!

But then I guess it will also get us to open up about our painting practices and process!!!. I got a bit carried away there, but this project is a two hander between landscape and painting, and as you've said in your text the two are intertwined!

But it's getting to grips with how to use this blog for our needs, what do we want out of it. Use it as a tool, a dumping ground for thoughts and ideas between us. Like a shared sketchbook. It's wierd, as I found it hard to think who I was writing for on it, but I think I can write the best when I just write like I'm talking to you. I guess the blog is somewhere for us to actually lock down a particularly thought, have it logged in the archive for the other person to feed off.

Just like we're slowly bringing the threads together between our practices, I guess we'll start to figure out how to use this blog, maybe it will become more organic as we go along. Maybe the different way we use this blog will reflect our individual practices and working methods! who knows. The challenge to work together on this is a great one...it's not easy for two artists to just come together and form a working relationship between their practices...it takes time. What I'm trying to say is that on the one hand we're learning more about the theme of landscape, but at the same time we're learning more about each others working methods and how we can work together. It's kind of obvious, but it's what's on my mind as a try to get my head around how to use the blog.