Katie Hammond and Alison Gray | INSCAPE

: the essential quality of a creature, thing, or form; it’s distinctive beauty.

9th July – 2nd September 2018

INSCAPE is a collaborative exhibition by recent graduates of Gray’s School of Art, Alison Gray and Katie Hammond. They have come together to explore and conceptualise the relationship between man and the landscape by abstracting it and imputing personal human meaning and emotion to the land, yet the works are void of any physical human figure.

‘Solivagant’: a word coined by Robert Macfarlane; ‘to wander alone’, underlines the notion of being at one with the landscape, seeing it and being in solitude within your own thoughts and feelings. Therefore the works are not empty, they are full of human meaning, natural and man-made history which is represented by the processes worked and re-worked, added and subtracted, only to add paint again.

They are reminiscent of the Norse word ‘Bliekr’ described by Macfarlane as a word through which the bone shows. This too, mimics the extremely slow processes and deep time and geological history, revealing the structures and movement beneath the surface. The land’s bones and archaeology lives and breathes alongside us. It is often described by Macfarlane as a living entity that feels and sees. “It watches us arrive, it will watch us leave” reminding us that time will continue without us; nature is always moving and evolving. It reveals the relentlessness and persistence of nature through its tensions but also its moments that lull us into a dreamlike calm.

All work is for sale and available to buy in The GHAT Shop.