Morning clouds reflected in a small coastal pond on Santa Rosa Island, Navarre, Fl., 11 May 2025
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British Grasses Kimono, 2015
Anthea Hamilton
Digitally printed silk, cotton, wicker, cotton rope, stainless steel
The Japanese kimono robe is a regular motif within Hamilton's work, allowing her to create unique cultural juxtapositions. Here, the kimono is printed with enlarged images of Roger Phillips' photos from his 1980 book Grasses, Ferns, Mosses and Lichens of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Phillips was a renowned photographer and botanist, and books like his show the diversity of plant life in the UK. Hamilton focuses on grasses in this work, highlighting the different appearances and aesthetic value to be found in these often overlooked plants.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
Cookie in the Snow, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, February 1984
Chris Killip
Photographs, gelatin silver print on paper
Chris Killip wasn't welcome on Lynemouth beach, Northumbria: not at first Warded off by locals as a potential spy from the council, on the lookout for those who might be claiming benefits alongside sifting flammable fossils out of the roiling sea, it was until seacoaler Trevor Critchlow and his wife Margaret vouched for him that Killip was permitted to walk upon the sands with the people who winnowed the water. And so we are able to look at these astonishing images of a place that 'confounded time', as Killip put it: 'where the Middle Ages and the twentieth century intertwined'. Black-and-white photographs, as they had to be, made in the palette of coal and North Sea foam.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
Prospect - Archaeology of Soul, 1987
Derek Jarman
Acrylic paint, glass, flint, string and lead on canvas
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
The Bridge, c1786
Thomas Gainsborough
Oil paint on canvas
Gainsborough's landscapes fuse references to the works of Italian old master painters with his own ideas and observations on nature, creating a highly individual vision of a British rural idyll. This sombre scene may be a view in the Lake District, which he had visited in 1783. Toward the end of his life, his mood became increasingly poetic, creating dramatic paintings that anticipated the later landscapes of Constable and Turner.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
(A303) Built by Immigrants, 2019
Jeremy Deller
Mixed media
The A303 road runs across the south of England, on a route that runs directly past Stonehenge. Deller's irreverent message applies to both the past and the present. In the present day, it is a literal reminder that Britain relies on migrant labour in many sectors, and that the people behind this labour are often invisible or demonised in the media. Alongside this, Deller also created a partner artwork which reads 'Stonehenge Built by Immigrants', referring to the stone itself which likely to have been transported from Pembrokeshire in Wales. Such statements undermine ideas of 'Englishness' associated with the countryside and sites such as Stonehenge, reflecting the complexity of the real story.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
British Grasses Kimono, 2015
Anthea Hamilton
Digitally printed silk, cotton, wicker, cotton rope, stainless steel
The Japanese kimono robe is a regular motif within Hamilton's work, allowing her to create unique cultural juxtapositions. Here, the kimono is printed with enlarged images of Roger Phillips' photos from his 1980 book Grasses, Ferns, Mosses and Lichens of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Phillips was a renowned photographer and botanist, and books like his show the diversity of plant life in the UK. Hamilton focuses on grasses in this work, highlighting the different appearances and aesthetic value to be found in these often overlooked plants.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
The Bridge, c1786
Thomas Gainsborough
Oil paint on canvas
Gainsborough's landscapes fuse references to the works of Italian old master painters with his own ideas and observations on nature, creating a highly individual vision of a British rural idyll. This sombre scene may be a view in the Lake District, which he had visited in 1783. Toward the end of his life, his mood became increasingly poetic, creating dramatic paintings that anticipated the later landscapes of Constable and Turner.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
Haywain with Cruise Missiles, 1980
Peter Kennard
Chromolithograph on paper and photographs on paper
Kennard's Haywain with Cruise Missiles speaks deeply to me. It's a fantastic piece of pastiche propaganda, highlighting the absurdity of nuclear war and the incongruity of placing modern weapons capable exterminating civilisation in the leafy fastness of the Home Counties. John Constable's original hay car (The Hay Wain, 1821), which once brought fodder for livestock, has now become a vehicle for transporting mega-death. The fact that it appears bogged down in the landscape is also appropriate: the convoys bringing the cruise missiles to Greenham Common were tracked by protesters who lay down in front of them to hinder their progress.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
British Grasses Kimono, 2015
Anthea Hamilton
Digitally printed silk, cotton, wicker, cotton rope, stainless steel
The Japanese kimono robe is a regular motif within Hamilton's work, allowing her to create unique cultural juxtapositions. Here, the kimono is printed with enlarged images of Roger Phillips' photos from his 1980 book Grasses, Ferns, Mosses and Lichens of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Phillips was a renowned photographer and botanist, and books like his show the diversity of plant life in the UK. Hamilton focuses on grasses in this work, highlighting the different appearances and aesthetic value to be found in these often overlooked plants.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
Prospect - Archaeology of Soul, 1987
Derek Jarman
Acrylic paint, glass, flint, string and lead on canvas
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
Haywain with Cruise Missiles, 1980
Peter Kennard
Chromolithograph on paper and photographs on paper
Kennard's Haywain with Cruise Missiles speaks deeply to me. It's a fantastic piece of pastiche propaganda, highlighting the absurdity of nuclear war and the incongruity of placing modern weapons capable exterminating civilisation in the leafy fastness of the Home Counties. John Constable's original hay car (The Hay Wain, 1821), which once brought fodder for livestock, has now become a vehicle for transporting mega-death. The fact that it appears bogged down in the landscape is also appropriate: the convoys bringing the cruise missiles to Greenham Common were tracked by protesters who lay down in front of them to hinder their progress.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
Cookie in the Snow, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, February 1984
Chris Killip
Photographs, gelatin silver print on paper
Chris Killip wasn't welcome on Lynemouth beach, Northumbria: not at first Warded off by locals as a potential spy from the council, on the lookout for those who might be claiming benefits alongside sifting flammable fossils out of the roiling sea, it was until seacoaler Trevor Critchlow and his wife Margaret vouched for him that Killip was permitted to walk upon the sands with the people who winnowed the water. And so we are able to look at these astonishing images of a place that 'confounded time', as Killip put it: 'where the Middle Ages and the twentieth century intertwined'. Black-and-white photographs, as they had to be, made in the palette of coal and North Sea foam.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
Apple Tree, 1962
Anwar Jalal Shemza
Oil paint on hardboard
Shemza was an artist, writer and teacher who worked in Pakistan before relocating to England in 1962. Shemza was initially influenced by modern art, most notably Paul Klee. His migrant perspective led him to expand the language of modernism through the prism of Islamic aesthetics. His work combined calligraphy and geometry with painterly patterning evoking the rural landscapes of Staffordshire, where the artist lived from the early 1960s onwards.*
From the exhibition
Radical Landscapes: Art inspired by the land
(October 2023 - February 2024)
Radical Landscapes is a major exhibition showing over a century of art inspired by the land.
Radical Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the natural world as a space for artistic inspiration, social connection, and political and cultural protest through the lens of William Morris, one of Britain’s earliest and most influential environmental thinkers. Organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the exhibition displays work spanning two centuries and features more than 60 works by artists including JMW Turner, Claude Cahun, Hurvin Anderson, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Deller and Veronica Ryan.
This exhibition offers an expanded view of British landscape art focusing on the early twentieth century until today. Traditional landscape painting is associated with idyllic rural scenes, which can express an artist's appreciation of nature and have helped form perceptions of the national identity. The pictorial conventions of landscape art can also express the status of land ownership, themes of exclusion, or control over nature. Outside of painting, artists have turned to techniques including film, photography, performance and installation art, showing how art can be made in and of the land, rather than by viewing it as a constructed 'scape'.
Radical Landscapes explores the relationship between land, history, and identity. It includes themes of trespass, using art to explore the thresholds between public and private land, showing how these relate to our senses of identity and belonging. The enclosing of rural land and its perceived misuse has triggered protests throughout history, linking to broader arguments around civil freedoms alongside the long shadow of colonialism.
Art can provide a vehicle for learning from and coexisting with nature and with each other. Against the context of the global climate emergency, the natural world is increasingly seen as something to protect and preserve, and many artists have produced work in parallel to the development of the modern environmental movement. All of this has provided fertile ground for artists and activists. Radical Landscapes presents the rural as a site of artistic inspiration as well as a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
[*William Morris Gallery]
Taken in the William Morris Gallery
