2013
EXHIBITION FOREWORD :
‘Moor’ examines the poetic and presented wilderness zones of Penwith, Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor, and represents a personal journey that I have built up with that particular landscape over many years.
I hope that these paintings describe some of the sublime and emotive energy experienced on the Moor, perhaps emphasized through the use of the gesture and texture of paint and material, however the paintings are polluted with reminders of the contemporary influence on this landscape and might be seen purely as romantic if they were not distorted, sometimes delicately and sometimes radically in subject matter, texture and meaning by modern intervention. A winding road cuts through ‘Crossing the Moor’, etched into an otherwise overwhelming elemental moorland triptych, likewise a real car radiator sits in the painting ‘Distant Long Barrow and Car Radiator’ and toy cars predominate in an image of the A30 and Dartmoor. a beer can is glued to another vast triptych of a moorland stream. It is a layered landscape, literally and metaphorically. The paintings are built with different types of paint, varnish, plaster, plastics, soils, pigments, felt, hay and other unconventional materials. To this rich surface often relevant artifacts are added, suggesting reminders or a memory, which is intrinsic to me. The idea of a layered landscape is one that fits my experience of the Moor, its geology and history, being equally matched by idiosyncratic histories, memories of those who visit. Perhaps it is a confused notion that I seek.
I hope that no image is left untouched by the awareness of change, memory, history or emotion, often the landscapes story or journey is intentionally opaque, but I hope that these paintings remind us that we are but another layer in time.
Andrew Hardwick, 2012
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