“...when we look at a landscape, we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there. We attribute qualities to a landscape which it does not intrinsically possess – savageness, for example, or bleakness – and we value it accordingly. We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.”
- Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind
“We walk’d upon the very brink, in a literal sense, of Destruction; one Stumble, and both Life and Carcass had been at once destroy’d. The sense of all this produc’d different motions in me, viz., a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled...”
- John Dennis, in a letter to a friend about his alpine travels in the summer of 1688
Badlands is a group exhibition that deals with themes of chaos, disorder, transformation, and the sublime in the work of four painters: Henry Tyrrell, Ollie Guyon, Emily Mary Barnett, and George Chapman. Each painter touches on their own idea of the sublime in their painting practice through the instability and unpredictability of painting. Edmund Burke first articulated the notion of the sublime in 1757 as the relationship between the feeling of terror associated with the savage landscape, and the passion that it aroused in our imagination:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
These ideas were later taken up by the Romantic painters of the nineteenth century, who sought out the sublime in nature. Burke was writing at a time marked by a perspective shift on how bleak and inhospitable landscapes were viewed. Mountains, along with canyons, volcanos, deserts, and arctic landscapes, changed from being viewed as unpleasant or harsh to savagely beautiful environments – places that challenged classical notions of beauty, and were in themselves physically challenging for the explorers and walkers who sought out their beauty first-hand. As Robert Macfarlane phrased it, “Solitude, deathliness, sterility, barrenness, inhumanity – these were the qualities of a landscape which Romanticism had made so appealing.”
In contrast to the Romantic view of the sublime, the artists in this exhibition seek out the sublime in the form and materiality of painting. The act of painting is a difficult gamble. Given paint’s unpredictable qualities, the artist is never fully in control of the outcome. Yet the painter proceeds with their experiment in spite of the odds that they will fail, to create something that is both savage and beautiful.
Emily Mary Barnett’s paintings are concerned with expressive bodily gestures, movement, and the physical properties of paint. Barnett uses improvisation and rule-bound procedures, testing the limits and contradictions of intuition and spontaneity. Her work is driven by an urge to represent the intangible – a feeling or particular moment in time – and the viewer is invited to decipher these representations. Barnett presents a tactile and sculptural canvas imbued with energy, which provokes the viewer’s natural yet frustrated desire to reach out and touch the work: teasing our familiar primal responses. More recently, her work has explored the moving canvas: propping, tearing, draping and pinning it loosely against the wall, moving it as the paint drips, using different consistencies of paint to affect the weight, speed and accuracy as it follows the canvas’s moving contours. In a moment of orchestrated chaos, the canvas seeks to escape the wall.
Henry Tyrrell’s paintings depict dark, cryptic landscapes. By gradually building up the painted, monochromatic surface and then scraping away to reveal new textures and formations, Tyrrell has created paintings that are both fascinating and unsettling for evoking a feeling of chaos and uncertainty in the composition. Looking at his ambitious canvases, it’s difficult to grasp the plane or perspective, where odd shapes can look either like landscape formations or like spontaneous shapes emerging from the subconscious. Tyrrell’s paintings point to something fantastical or otherworldly, recalling primitive, unconscious symbolism and archetypes. At the same time the basic conventions of painting, like gesture, symbol and the substance of oil paint itself, are played with through his use of increasingly heavy duty application techniques.
Ollie Guyon’s work is rooted within the expanded field of painting. It questions the possibilities of what painting is. These paintings explore the object potential of space, colour, line and edge. Raised planes are used as a device to create tension between surface and depth. The effect of light on concave and convex surfaces extends the tonality of a given colour field. The fabric of the work explores the dichotomy between minimalist composition with historical painting methodologies: in particular, adding pigment to handmade gesso to create a tinted ground. The gesso is wet-sanded and polished to varying degrees to create different effects. The finished surface is traditionally considered as a preparatory painting ground which creates a paradox, in that these object paintings may also be considered as non-paintings.
George Chapman’s paintings deal with urban spaces that have frequently become derelict and imbued with a haunted sense of failure, emptiness, and nostalgia. Chapman uses colours that are emotive and create a subjective impression of the derelict space, as though viewing it from memory or in a dream. He treats the surfaces of his paintings according to the feeling of the space he is trying to depict: colours may be poured directly onto raw canvas or the impression of a space may be built up only to be degraded or defaced to reflect a time-worn aspect. In this sense, Chapman’s works are about blight and disintegration, but also about the fine line between the evocative nature of memory and the unsettling feeling that you are permanently estranged from home.
These themes, of the innate disorder in creating something new, of material transformation, of the search for the sublime in repellent or inhospitable surfaces, are what we look to question in this exhibition. Chances are taken and accidents embraced. It is only by accepting the odds of a chaotic outcome – of inherent instability when pushing the medium or ground to their material or chemical thresholds – that we resolve a composition, often with unexpected results.
Artist Biographies
Emily Mary Barnett, b. 1984, recently completed the Turps Banana Off-site Painting
Programme between 2020-21. She has shown in various group exhibitions in London, including at Craft Central Gallery, Unit 3 Projects Gallery, Dronica Arts Festival, Power Lunches, and Deceased17 Gallery. She has also shown at The Reading Room in Wales and East Jesus Gallery in California.
Henry Tyrrell, b. 1984, received an MA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2018 and a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2012. He has shown in group exhibitions in London including at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, Thames-side Studios Gallery, Charlton Gallery, Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop and OHSH Projects. He had a solo exhibition called Purkinje Flying at GlaxoSmithKline, Brentford in 2014. He participated in the Radical Residency at the Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop, London in 2019 and in the Fine Art Collective Griffin Gallery Residency at Col Art in London in 2017.
Ollie Guyon, b. 1994, received a BA in Fine Art from Bath School of Art in 2017. He has shown in group exhibitions at Divisible Projects in Ohio, USA, Elysium Gallery in Cardiff for the 2018 Beep Painting Prize Biennial, and shown numerous times at Centrespace Gallery in Bristol. Earlier this year he was part of a group show on expanded painting at General Practise in Lincoln, and is currently participating in A Generous Space also currently at Hastings Contemporary, as well as a prospective group show at Gallery North in Newcastle later this year.
George Chapman, b. 1988, received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2010 and recently completed the Turps Banana Off-site Painting Programme between 2020-21. He has shown in group exhibitions in South Africa, the UK, and Portugal, including at Thames-side Studios Gallery, Norval Foundation, and PADA Studios Gallery. In 2017, he held a solo exhibition at Art Hub Studios Gallery in Deptford, and in 2021 he held a joint exhibition with Will Thorburn at Space Gallery in Folkestone as part of the 2021 Folkestone Fringe programme. In 2019, he participated in the PADA Studios residency programme in Lisbon.