A Green and Pleasant Land? Rural Life in Art
Date uploaded: July 29, 2015
In Certain Places present artworks by Rebecca Chesney, Joanne Lee and Abigail Townsend, as part of the Harris Museum & Art Gallery's summer show 'A Green and Pleasant Land? Rural Life in Art'.The exhibition, which runs until the end of September, explores how artists have been inspired by rural heritage, from the romantic to the real.
Images from the Harris collection include Preston landscapes and work by Anthony Devis, Thomas Wade, Adrian Stokes and Norman Stevens, which will be exhibited alongside existing work by contemporary artists such as Georgina Barney, Andrew Cross and Abigail Townsend, and new commissions by Rebecca Chesney and Joanne Lee.
The exhibition also includes a display of ceramics by the Northern Potters Association in the museum cafe and a photography show by students from Myerscough College. Click here for more information.
About the artists:
Rebecca Chesney is interested in how we perceive land: how we romanticise, translate and define urban and rural spaces. She looks at how politics, ownership, management and commercial value all influence our surroundings, and has made extensive investigations into the impact of human activities on nature and the environment. Exploring the blurred boundaries between science and folklore, her work is also concerned with how our understanding of species is fed by this confused mix of truth and fiction. Her contribution to the exhibition, 'Death by Denim', explores notions of accepted behaviour and dress within the English countryside.
Abigail Townsend is an artist and student on the UCLan Fine Art Site & Archive Interventions MA. Her artistic practice is formed out of responding to her cultural and creative landscape. The shaping and forming of a place and the means by which the reflected cultural values can be represented are her central concerns. Her project, Ruskin’s View - a sound and film piece which will be shown in the exhibition, exposes an iconic and beautiful viewing point in the Lake District to closer scrutiny, in order to present an alternative view of the landscape.
Joanne Lee is an artist, writer and publisher with a curiosity about everyday life and the ordinary places in which she lives and works. Much of her activity emerges through a serial publication, the Pam Flett Press, which explores the visual, verbal and temporal possibilities of the ‘essay’, and via the opportunities for production that arise in dialogue with creative and critical friends. She is Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. For the exhibition, she has created a series of photographic works, entitled 'Witches Knickers', which examine the ubiquity of plastic in the landscape.
For more information e-mail Elaine Speight - [email protected]
The exhibition is supported by the Friends of the Harris Museum & Art Gallery.
25th of July to the 26th of September 2015
Harris Museum & Art Gallery
Market Square
Preston
PR1 2PP
Special Early Evening Opening: Thursday the 13th of August, 5.30-7.00pm - Free: Includes talks, curator tours and the chance to meet exhibiting artists.
