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Disrupted Landscapes examines three representations of landscape in which personal histories, family trauma, and political narratives combine with the geology, geography, and the topographical uniqueness of England’s thin places. The idea for the exhibition developed from Mandy Williams and her ongoing series, also called Disrupted Landscapes.
In this work, she distorts and displaces images of the white cliffs of Dover and its politicised coastal landscape. This suggests the fracturing of the idealisation of the English landscape and the increasingly hostile environment of a country divided by class, geography, and wealth in the post-Brexit age.
Mandy Williams
Different strata of land are revealed in her photographs of the coastal chalk. We are looking at geological time, trace elements of a world where the earth buckles and bends to the beat of shifting plates and layers of lava, rock, and sediment.
Taking this chalk landscape, prone to fragmentation and disruption, Williams applies graphic elements, cutting up the landscape into shards and splinters of space, shattered and disconnected from where they came from.
Dawn Rodgers
The stratas of landscape revealed in Dawn Rodgers’ Sorrow are those connected to memory and grief, to this world and what lies beyond. Sorrow is a book and exhibition that is an ongoing exploration of the complexity of grief and bereavement. Focussing on the death of her brother 30 years ago, it is an expression of the absolute sorrow of unreconciled grief and the desolation of absence.
The story of Sorrow is told through images from Rodgers’ family album combined with documentation of her brother’s death. The hard facts of his death certificate, the reduction of a life to dates, times, and places bleeds into the ink stains that Rodgers integrates into her work.
Mixing these multiple layers of memory with images of the hillsides and beach environments of Dorset, Sorrow invites the viewer to connect the link between the traces left behind by her brother and how that loss has become scoured by Rodgers into Dorset landscapes that resonate with the past. Sorrow is an expression of loss, of life, possibility, and of Rodgers’ own ability to find words to describe the brutality and finality of bereavement.
Colin Pantall
Colin Pantall’s 3 Valleys looks at how memory and time transform the landscape around his home in Bath. The repeated walks he takes in 3 valleys traverse places where echoes of the past resonate through the contours of the land. Through these walkings, repeated over 20 years, different histories emerge: geological, economic, botanical, physical, and family histories. And with each revealed history, the images become ever more distant, anemoic memories of a place and a time that is just a figment of photographic imagination, that never really existed, and is preserved only in the photograph.
Images that were once a portent of impending mortality become memento mori, a neglected patch of grass is transformed into a restorative sanctuary, and an image of a valley where Jane Austen once walked becomes a nostalgic visit to a fenced-in and degraded landscape.
In Disrupted Landscapes, the earth holds knowledge, holds histories, and provides pathways between different strata of being and selfhood.
Exhibition Details
Disrupted Landscapes
Wednesday 13 – Sunday 16 March 2024
Four Corners, 121 Roman Road London E2 0QN
Private View: Thursday 14 March