Photo © Jules Lister For 150 years, Weston Park Museum has reflected how people have gathered and treasured aspects of the world around them. This new exhibition, curated by the Heavy Water Collective (artists Maud Haya-Baviera, Victoria Lucas, and Joanna Whittle), examines the curious, beautiful, macabre, and magical connections people have made to the land through over 400 objects from Sheffield’s eclectic museum collections. Since prehistory, humans have sought to make sense of the...

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...

Photo © Will Slater, 2025 Unquiet Landscapes at Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield Unquiet Landscapes is a collaboration between Contemporary British Painting and Yorkshire Artspace, curated by Joanna Whittle. “The land will entrance us and in the end bury us, with impartiality. If it seems to have great beauty, that is because of what we are, not because of what it is… The unquiet country is you.” – Christopher Neve, Unquiet Landscape : places and ideas in twentieth-century English painting (1990)...