British landscape: four solo exhibitions
- Submitting institution
-
Middlesex University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 402
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne
- Open access status
- -
- Month of production
- April
- Year of production
- 2015
- URL
-
http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/26468/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Richard Billingham has researched landscape since the 1990s in parallel with his autobiographical work. His ongoing project, British Landscape, explores two distinct ways of representing the British landscape with analogue photography. One is instinctive, snapshot-like and exploits lo-res photography. The other is much more considered, methodical and reflective, and exploits hi-res photography. Each presents a different set of challenges, relating to concepts of immediacy or reflectiveness. Billingham’s landscape miniatures evidence a deep connection with historical British landscape painting, much of which is associated with Romanticism and place. Billingham’s choice of locations is informed by the British ‘Place Art’ of landscape and open-air painters, and their relationships with particular and iconic British regions. Larger scale works draw on the panoramic paintings of Ivon Hitchens. Hitchens painted the Essex landscape ‘plein air’ and developed a method of composing his paintings in panoramic format to match the way the human eye sees the landscape: most often, horizontally - left to right / right to left. A wide panoramic canvas allows several interrelated elements, space or forms to ‘echo,’ or for colour areas to inter-react.
This project resulted in four solo exhibitions between 2015 and 2018: Panoramic at Towner and Glynn Vivian Galleries; and Panorama at Annelly Juda and Federico Luger Galleries. All four were curated/co-curated by Billingham to exploit the scale of the works and allow images to inter-react, creating rhythm and providing a rich, layered viewing experience
Panoramic opened up a dialogue between form and content in Billingham’s practice-based landscape work, cutting across multiple themes: time, region, place, geography, photographic approach, motif, and transformative moments in the landscape according to light/weather. In Panorama, the aim was to reveal the evolution of the artist’s British landscape photography from standard formats into panoramic, between 2001 and 2017.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -