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HERITAGE HUB
THURSDAY 1 – SUNDAY 4 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 12′ (looped)

Content warning: discussion of climate anxiety. 

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Landscape Landscape observes and responds to a series of fallen trees over the course of 13 months in the aftermath of Storm Arwen, the weather event that battered Britain, Ireland and France towards the end of 2021. An expansion of her 2022 short Portrait Landscape, the work is a typically playful and considered response to climate collapse by Alchemy alumnus Jessie Growden.

In Landscape Landscape, the artist has created something resembling the diary of a forest. Capturing upturned trees with her camera similarly tilted to more or less a right angle, Growden plays with perception, overlaying moving-image records with stills made from the same vantage point. Superimposing these images to produce a video image that is at once whole and fractured, the artist builds a film that takes its meaning from the found structures of the environment in which it was shot.

The concept and effect are inherently cinematic, something akin to a digital form of structural cinema. Returning to the same site multiple times, Growden limits the variables so that variation across time can be felt – with the apparent sameness of the once-vertical trees only calling attention to changes, seasonal and otherwise. Keeping with the structural intentions of her film, the artist nests frames within frames – a result of making images at slightly different locations along an apparently identical axis – to involve audiences in an act of creative spectatorship. We look this way, and then we look that way.

Just as our heads tilt to make sense of the image, the artist’s framing choice is a careful act of defamiliarisation, with the landscape format deployed in service of that which is otherwise horizontal. It’s not exactly a comfortable watch, this, precisely due to the deliberate deployment of the rectangular format to make a landscape’s vertical features appear upright again. In this way, the film’s apparent formal simplicity functions to connect the strange way in which we watch these images to the strangeness of the images themselves. As such, the film’s unspoken lament persists like the sound of a nearby river: these days, there’s nothing natural about the weather.