Yelena Popova - Made Ground

About

We are pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Nottingham-based artist Yelena Popova, opening at Cample on 1 October. Please join Yelena and our team 1.30-4.30pm for refreshments and a first look.

The exhibition includes a new substantial painting installation, for which Yelena has used soil and rock that she collected locally to Cample. Installed by Yelena in our upstairs space, it continues a wider body of ‘post-petrochemical paintings’, and is her most sustained exploration of a place through soil, stone, pigment, gesture and colour.

'Made ground', the exhibition's title, is the term used to refer to land where natural and undisturbed soils have largely been replaced by man-made or artificial materials. In developing her work for Cample, Yelena has drawn upon her interest in land use and the relationship between geological depository and the kinds of artificial deposits or changes to land surface that resulted from local industries such as mining.

Using soils, small pieces of red sandstone and terracotta brick fragments from a number of locations, including Kings Quarry and the rivers Scaur and Nith, Yelena ground the pigments by hand in her studio, producing an array of reds, pinks and browns that directly reflect the geology of the area whilst also evoking many other things for the artist - ‘meat, blood, red wine, cocoa…’

In a newly commissioned text, writer and curator George Vasey suggests: 'Popova’s work performs a double archaeology digging into the earth and into the past, ecology and art history. Much like archaeology, this work is about time and its impact on place; how natural and human activity is archived in the soil.'