2015
EXHIBITION FOREWORD :
The exhibition represents two years of returning to known landscapes. Like those of the estuary and coast around Portishead, where I work and grew up. Also that of the moors. Exmoor and Dartmoor especially, where as a regular visitor I return for solace.
These landscapes are personal, known, remembered yet at the same time, strange and always new, when revisited.
The landscapes are embedded in my personal history; their scars, both geological and historical are joined with mine and all washed over by the power of the elements and time.
Working in the studio, I try, with conglomerates of texture, to express something of these feelings. Oil paint, acrylic paint, earth pigments, ashes, glue, plastic, hay and other found or discarded material might find a place. Ever present in the image is the sky, which I find hard to deny...
These landscapes are personal, known, remembered yet at the same time, strange and always new, when revisited.
The landscapes are embedded in my personal history; their scars, both geological and historical are joined with mine and all washed over by the power of the elements and time.
Working in the studio, I try, with conglomerates of texture, to express something of these feelings. Oil paint, acrylic paint, earth pigments, ashes, glue, plastic, hay and other found or discarded material might find a place. Ever present in the image is the sky, which I find hard to deny...
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In some images, ghost-like abandoned quarries, forgotten roads and railway tracks appear. They are explained in paint, matter and old toys. A plastic jet disturbs one painting of a seemingly tranquil vast moor. It is a modern world.
Increasingly my places are upset by walkers and new nature reserves. The walkers come from new housing estates that have sanitised and replaced the post-industrial wilderness that ran alongside the estuary.
Even the old burnt-out cars have now gone, swallowed up by the ground, their lives now joining those, of earlier and more ancient artefacts below. Helping on a local archaeological dig, I found in the medieval layer, clay pipes and pottery all infused with heating oil leaking from a nearby office.
It is a landscape of strangeness and contradiction. I like to contrast the the power of this coast and the moorland wilderness I visit, by including their car parks and roads that take people into their depths. Also to show a playfulness of the modern world by producing my images out of materials that perhaps could have been taken out of a skip.
As always when visiting old friends, there are certainties mixed with surprises. Love, regret, joy, fear, feelings of loss, and time now gone, but also of renewal and celebration.
Andrew Hardwick. 2015
ONLINE CATALOGUE (click below) :
