Badlands

About

“...when we look at a landscape, we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there. We attribute qualities to a landscape which it does not intrinsically possess – savageness, for example, or bleakness – and we value it accordingly. We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.”

- Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind

“We walk’d upon the very brink, in a literal sense, of Destruction; one Stumble, and both Life and Carcass had been at once destroy’d. The sense of all this produc’d different motions in me, viz., a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled...”

- John Dennis, in a letter to a friend about his alpine travels in the summer of 1688

Badlands is a group exhibition that deals with themes of chaos, disorder, transformation, and the sublime in the work of four painters: Henry Tyrrell, Ollie Guyon, Emily Mary Barnett, and George Chapman. Each painter touches on their own idea of the sublime in their painting practice through the instability and unpredictability of painting. Edmund Burke first articulated the notion of the sublime in 1757 as the relationship between the feeling of terror associated with the savage landscape, and the passion that it aroused in our imagination:

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

These ideas were later taken up by the Romantic painters of the nineteenth century, who sought out the sublime in nature. Burke was writing at a time marked by a perspective shift on how bleak and inhospitable landscapes were viewed. Mountains, along with canyons, volcanos, deserts, and arctic landscapes, changed from being viewed as unpleasant or harsh to savagely beautiful environments – places that challenged classical notions of beauty, and were in themselves physically challenging for the explorers and walkers who sought out their beauty first-hand. As Robert Macfarlane phrased it, “Solitude, deathliness, sterility, barrenness, inhumanity – these were the qualities of a landscape which Romanticism had made so appealing.”

In contrast to the Romantic view of the sublime, the artists in this exhibition seek out the sublime in the form and materiality of painting. The act of painting is a difficult gamble. Given paint’s unpredictable qualities, the artist is never fully in control of the outcome. Yet the painter proceeds with their experiment in spite of the odds that they will fail, to create something that is both savage and beautiful.