Unquiet Landscapes Catalogue Essay

Catalogue Essay, Joanna Whittle, 2025

When I was asked to curate a ‘landscape exhibition’ I considered how to underpin this beyond a summary of how contemporary painters approach landscape in their practices today, so it could become more an inquiry, of why the construct of ‘landscape’ still matters as a source and what this construct means to those who still choose to employ it both in spite of and because of the romanticism which wraps around it. At the time of being asked I was reading and rereading Christopher Neve’s text whilst undertaking many journeys from the north to the southeast of England. Watching the unfolding of the British landscape where hills gave away to fens, to the spilling of brown fields on the outskirts of cities and the deep breath of London as the train pulled in only to be pulled sideways into the hop fields of Kent. An unravelling of estuaries and skies. Landscape which carries all the traces of history and our changing times beneath its f ields and turning leaves.

I first thought of the exhibition as a sort of epilogue or long awaited sequel, as though this consideration of landscape through the work of those Neve examines, could somehow foment landscape painters today in a clear and well beaten pathway. But as Neve points out:

The characteristic of reality is that it is made-up of frozen moments (discrete time), perceived one after another […] But paintings represent one moment continually. That they are objects and not ideas is their strength and their limitation. (Neve 2020 [1990] p.24)

This idea of one moment perpetually existing is an act of repetition, rather than a sequence. Something that beats through time and is not contiguous with it, but embedded in it. So I came to realise that the exhibition seems more to act as papers slipped between the pages of the book, rather than an addendum. And as Neve bisects the book into two parts, of ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ places, the selected works seem to weave between these two territories, the missing terrain into which contemporary landscape painters emerge, gathering both aspects of landscape as experienced and observed but also those elusive elements of their own psychology, of history and of the fragile and collapsing structure of the present which pulls the ground away from beneath them.

I selected the works and painters, mostly painters but not all, in the exhibition as a conversation with those represented in the book, thinking of Neve traversing the country to sit at their tables and drink tea, except not as cosy. More like two people encountering each other in the countryside, on a wet day and each thinking they vaguely recognised the other, but not being certain, passing on with an unsettling feeling of something half remembered, but not quite grasped. And all that time slipping and sliding between them. Some of the included artists have selected passages from the text, and for those who haven’t, I have selected my own, slipping them back between the pages. The themes I have picked out here are those which seem to speak most to the work, which whisper through the exhibition.

Joanna Whittle, 2025

Read the full essay and view the catalogue of works below:

Unquiet-Landscapes-catalogue.pdf

Download PDF • 3.27MB