In Sutherland's Footsteps
(note: For Academic REF please refer to the portfolio for writing)
’For myself I believe that a new vision must grow out of reality – that the mysterious, intangible must be made immediate and tangible.’’
‘’Shadows had a presence, certain formations of rock seemed to go beyond just being a rock, they were emanation’s, some kind of personality.’’ (Sutherland, 1982)
Artistic Statement
In Sutherlands Footsteps comprises of print photographs, a 20 mins digital dance film, a collection of shorter films and audio.
I poetically trace in the footsteps of Graham Sutherland and specific locations he painted in Pembrokeshire (in 1930’s and 1970s) particularly, Picton Ferry, Monks Haven, Sandy Haven, St Ishmaels, and Porthclais.
Sutherlands work is revisited as prescient and relevant to pressing ecological concerns of the 21st Century and his attention to the ‘mysterious and intangible,’ ‘presence’ of nature, of rocks, trees, hills, insects (Sutherland, 1982) speak to the age of the ‘post-humanist’ and eco-critical awareness in a rapidly changing world.
The body of work is a response to Sutherlands paintings and a response to a landscape I have lived in for more than fifty years. I seek an embodied and poetic encounter between the Pembrokeshire landscape, Sutherlands works and the feeling that I am tracing footsteps and awakening ghosts, memories whilst creating new artistic inscriptions. I grew up near Haverfordwest and my first encounter with ‘modern’ art was in 1976, age nine, on a school trip to the newly opened Picton Castle Gallery, dedicated to Sutherlands work. I will never forget this first encounter, that shaped me forever and set me on a life-long creative path.
The Sleeper/Dreamer in the Landscape
In Graham Sutherlands Pembrokeshire landscapes, the human subject is largely absent, and replaced by a micro world of abstractions, amplifying natural objects. Detailed observation of nature, take on their own anthropomorphic tendency and draw us into a sense of the sentience of all things. The face of a rock becomes a cathedral, the roots of trees become a flock of birds, thorns become claws and beaks, the sun becomes an anchored planet, radiant across winding lanes, shadows become crows, lanes become passages into space/time.
In my work, the human presence is reinserted, as a sleeper or dreamer, hovering between life and death, represented as a de-centred and small figure in the wider panorama and presence of the landscape. This decentring in the picture frame of the camera, is part of a conscious ‘post-enlightenment’ and ‘post-humanist’ position but also a choreographic ‘making strange’ of the human body and its figuration. In the figure of the sleeper/dreamer, I return the body to a horizontal or embedded place, that seeks solace, refuge and return into the landscape, in an act of reparation and ancestral remembering. The body could be interpreted as at a point of birth, transformation, repose or death and the images are intentionally poetic and ambiguous. As the world rapidly changes with climate change and a global eco-crisis, there is something urgently grounding about representing an embodied connection to the landscape.
The photographic images nod to the Romantic tradition of the body in the sublime landscape, in which Sutherland has an art historical lineage, but at the same time, reflects upon the fragility of our identity and increasingly precarious survival as humans. The trees at Picton Ferry, for example, were growing at the time Sutherland was painting and although eroding and decaying they remind us that our human presence is but fleeting and temporal compared to the epic time of geology and nature.