IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

The nature of this paper is a theoretical and visual inquiry into art, literature and landscape. It examines how modern British landscape literature articulates hidden and overlooked pre-occupations found in 17th and 18th century landscape painting; monumentalising the banal through making large-scale works depicting everyday landscapes. By focusing on the landscapes of the suburbs, edge-lands and the ordinary, modern landscape writing re-orientates these painterly pre-occupations, bringing contemporary insights into the contexts of ecology, geopolitics and ethnography. These findings are brought to bear in both my academic research and my practice as a photographer. In depicting, what Michael Rosenthal refers to as the ‘equilibrium between nature and the man-made landscape’, Gainsborough and Constable in particular focused on the landscapes of the everyday, the overlooked and the ordinary. These aspects of their work have been obscured by an undercurrent of reactionary misinterpretation, resulting in restrictive policies on countryside planning and urban regeneration. ‘The Everyday Pastoral’, examines how these readings of Gainsborough’s and Constable’s oeuvre have obscured the conceptual underpinning of their practice and how they are articulated in new landscape writing. The particular focus on the writing of W.G. Sebald, Robert Mcfarlane and Richard Mabey as each write about their interactions with the overlooked landscape. The visual resolution to this theoretical research is a set of photographic images depicting the overlooked landscapes of the everyday; adjoining the synchronous practices of historical painting and contemporary literature.