Genius Loci: Painting the Spirit of Place
5 - 8 May 2022
12-5pm, Thur to Sun
Private View :
Thursday 5 May 6-8pm
Genius Loci
Genius Loci brings together two painters who explore ways in which contemporary painting can address the pressing environmental issues particular to land today.
Relationship to place is central to the practice of both painters. Working from the study of coastal, industrial and post-industrial landscape sites, their painterly inquiries include an investigation of the material layering of the land, from the surface to the under layers and into the depths of the planet. Both artists bring the materiality of the sites and landscapes they explore into their work. Traces and fragments of the past; derelict industries, eroding cliffs and fallen settlements are bound up in their paintings. These materials bring with them the ghosts of histories and imagined futures that linger in these places, damaged landscapes where the residues of human impacts can be read across time, and places which are being haunted by ghosts of what has been lost and will be lost.
The work approaches the stratigraphy of painting; and how both the surface and layers within the works engage with the human impacts of the Anthropocene in relationship to landscape. In Robert’s work, strata are explicitly evident pictorially - the layering of zones of pigment and imagery becomes a compositional device which hints at material storytelling. The viewer is often led through the paintings from the top to the bottom of the picture plane, as different sets of information are partitioned in horizontal bands, layered vertically. In some cases, it is almost a diagrammatic cross section of the planet's atmosphere and body. The pigments utilized in Robert’s paintings are often created by the artist, through complex procedures which recycle waste material. The engagement with strata in Marielle’s work is through the subtle layering of synthetic and natural materials, which often fuse into one surface. Through a process of intention and accident, the layering of materials not only builds the painting but also exposes the reactions or tensions between layers. In some cases, this makes for unstable or fragile surfaces. Underlayers sometimes seep through, and top layers are at times erased in parts, or cracks might appear in the surface due to materials repelling one another..
In similar yet different ways, the paintings engage with materials in a way that offers a more-than-human perspective on contemporary landscape. Through close and repeated study of the strata of a particular place, the paintings become carriers of the atmosphere, the essence, the presiding spirit or genius loci of that place.
The exhibition is accompanied by a text from Anna Souter.
With support from: WRoCAH, CePRA University of Leeds
Artist Bios
Marielle Hehir
My practice explores ways in which contemporary painting might address the land as encountered in the time of the Anthropocene. Specifically, the work is abstracted from the canal network of Greater London – an edgeland which exists at the intersection of the natural and the built. The canal is also a structure that demonstrates human intervention with the land and offers a portrait of an industrial past.
I live on a narrowboat and navigate a portion of the canal network on a regular basis. As relationships between humankind and the landscape are emphasised during the Anthropocene, the lived experience of the canal network provides specific knowledge of the present and changing or changed conditions of the site. Moments of encounter with plants, animals, built elements and foreign elements such as pollution, are interpreted as aesthetic and/or material summaries of the concerns which feed into the paintings. In the studio materials which are common to the painting discipline are combined with materials which might be found at the canal. These new material relationships create surfaces which are fragile and precarious, evocative of the increasingly unstable landscape terrain of the Anthropocene. Through the paintings I aim to develop an aesthetic, which is as much about loss as it is about speculation for the future.
Bio
Marielle was born in Manchester and studied at Manchester Metropolitan University before completing an MA at the Slade School of Fine Art. Currently she is undertaking a practice-led PhD at the University of Leeds with full funding from WRoCAH.
Marielle has exhibited widely as well as taking part in several international artist residency programmes. Recent exhibitions include: Spectral Ground, 2021, The Woodshed Gallery, Folkestone (as part of Folkestone Triennial); Nightswimming 2018, Curated by LLE Gallery at Mission Gallery, Swansea; Squeeze, 2017, The Hive, London; Manchester Contemporary with LLE Gallery, 2016, Granada Studios, Manchester. In 2017 she was shortlisted for The John Ruskin Prize Exhibition, The Millenium Gallery, Sheffield and in 2016 she was shortlisted for Contemporary British Painting Prize Riverside Gallery, London.
marielle.hehir@gmail.com
www.mariellehehir.com
Robert Mead
Moving through the strata of my paintings digs up histories and ghosts of our past which linger in the changing landscapes of today. Using the materiality of painting and process of harvesting and making pigments, my paintings reveal different types of residue of human impacts on our planet. These are both visual and colourful but sometimes microscopic and hidden. Across my work spectral stray dogs inhabit post-human environments and landscapes rupture and transform. The ghosts of rock faces long since mined away intersect with figures of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. This imagery is bound with my own materials and pigments, manganese black harvested from old batteries, the clay of eroding cliffs, or brickwork from houses which have toppled into the sea. Symptoms and traces of human impacts, but also the overwhelming power of nature are embedded in the painting's layers, echoing our own growing presence in the current and future strata of the Earth, and the strands of human histories that are entwined with this. These multiple entanglements are buried in the paintings, fragments of image and symbol left open to the viewer to engage with and read through making different visual connections. For me this combination of imagery and material is an ongoing process in reflecting on the changing conditions of our planet and for imagining alternate ways of thinking about our relationship to both our past and our future.
Bio
Robert was born in Peterborough and studied at Chelsea school of art in London before completing his MA in painting with a full scholarship at the Slade School of Fine Art. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the Slade, receiving grants for fieldwork and also teaching on an undergraduate drawing programme.
Recent exhibitions include: Spectral Ground, 2021, The Woodshed Gallery, Folkestone (as part of Folkestone Triennial); the Colour/Collage/Poetry Symposium at UCL, 2021; Carpet Pages III: Pixels, 2020; Paper Cuts at the Saatchi Gallery in 2018. He was awarded the Duveen travel scholarship in 2017 for research carried out in Italy and was made an Honorary Research Associate at UCL Art Museum in 2018. More recently he has received a research grant for fieldwork on the Norfolk coast and the 2021 Max Werner Drawing Prize.
r.mgmead@gmail.com
www.robertmead.co.uk