No Stone Unturned: Exploring Perceptions of Wilderness

About

No Stone Unturned: Exploring Perceptions of Wilderness brings together five established artists who explore anthropocentric notions of the wild: Lissie Cowley, Mike Dodd, Alec Finlay, Melanie King & Jade Jamean Lees. With each artist focusing on a different aspect of wilderness particular to their practice, the exhibition will introduce themes of anxiety and fear towards the unknown, ecological issues caused by mankind, notions of tourism and media misrepresentation of nature and the way language attempts to make sense of the wild. 

This exhibition presents artworks which range from video and photography, to installation and literature, tied together within Nunns yard through their linking themes. No Stone Unturned, and the accompanying publication, complies the artist’s visions and thoughts, along with those from other fields such as land history and environmental science. 

Inspired by Emmanuel Kant’s theories on the sublime and how colonist attitudes have altered landscape, Lissie Cowley focuses on how the tourism trade of Iceland has affected the once unspoilt beauty. Making apparent her place in time as a millennial she responds to the online culture of falsities and manipulation by creating animated sequences overlaid with unexpected adjectives. Following on from a recent project inspired by Nan Shepherds seminal book, ‘The Living Mountain’ Mike Dodd physically stamped words onto the landscape, he now considers and manipulates man-made imitations of nature. With the interaction of text and image he aims to address the much-heralded age of the Anthropocene. Another artist using language to question how we as a culture or culture's relate to landscape is Alec Finlay. Finlay an artist & poet whose work crosses over a range of media and forms and on display will be a selection of his books and accompanying postcards. 

Another aspect the exhibition addresses is anxiety in relation to the wild and unknown. Jade Jamean Lees creates confused states that display her uneasiness with the world outside the safe walls of the home.  In these corners anxieties arise and elements of the outside become elements of the inside, evidencing a separation modern humans have to nature. Melanie King’s work is influenced by Thoreau’s idea of wilderness, as the surrounding unknown creeping up on us. Taking her camera to the depths of the darkness she captures the movement of the stars and the heaviness of the sky. King describes her experience of taking these photographs, of how fear is transformed into fascination, within the accompanying publication. 

Through the artworks and curation of the exhibition, No Stone Unturned will seek out an understanding, and a questioning of, contemporary ideas of wilderness.