On Land
ALEX CROCKER | IAN HOMERSTON
7 - 15 July 2018
So I’ve been thinking about painting and landscape in a very loose way; more of a sense of landscape rather than a depiction I guess. I have been reading a lot about the Brian Eno album On Land especially Mark Fisher's writing about it in relation to the 'eerie'... It kind of jogged my memory about asking if you would be interested in working on something together?
This makes me think of the landscape as having no fixed scale or boundary; the landscape isn't acting as a backdrop but as a kind of form. Scale and size sound like they could be important here.
I came across this line in an essay which reminded me of the writing on Eno you mentioned. It talks about 'making interiority visible - and converting ground into figure'.1 The idea of converting ground into figure sounds quite connected to what we're each doing at the moment... and also seems to resonate with the quote about landscape ceasing to be a backdrop.
The relation of size and scale is something that I have been very interested in recently, especially how they work within a space... but also the scale of the information within the painting. I have been thinking a lot about these fundamentals of making a painting, the basic ingredients.
1 Bruce Nauman: Going Solo, Robert Slifkin, Stephanie Snyder. Published by Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, 2012.
Accompanying publication