As I had some free time in Exeter recently on a research trip, I went to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum to see this exhibition. I don’t really know Dartmoor (although I’d like to, and hope to rectify this!) but the idea of this appealed to me. The principle of the show is Land Art – something I now know rather more about than I did before. The exhibits on show are mostly contemporary, but the movement began in the 1960s, in part as a way of making art which couldn’t be commodified or put in a gallery (ironically). This exhibition is thus mostly photographs, and they are moving and beautiful in ways I didn’t quite expect, demonstrating passing moments, temporary interventions of the human into nature.
One of the contributors to the exhibition, Maria Yates, is quoted early in the exhibition saying that:
My Dartmoor works were very temporary disturbances, hardly there at all, and were attempts to question the uses of landscape in art and the media and the covering over and obliteration of the historical remnants of centuries of human struggle. To me, landscape is a huge memory to be read and valued, and I treasured the finding of small pockets which resonated with shadows of the past.
This sets the tone for what follows: the exhibition offers us ways to consider the three-way relationship between landscape – a specific, wild place with its own histories and ecologies – and art, and people. Many of the works offer images of natural beauty (such as Nancy Holt’s Wistman’s Wood, 1969, which absorbs the viewer into the place with multiple images which seem to create one whole). Others, such as Richard Long’s works, are presented as text, fragments of poetry presented as art, and experienced in a very different way from other more specifically visual works, but capture the same feeling, and I loved LifeDeath and A Dartmoor Walk, both of which invite us into the specific experience of walking Dartmoor. I have encountered Long’s work before, in Tremenheere Line at the Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, so I know that he creates art by walking, working with nature as his medium.
The Summoning Stones (2024) by Alex Hartley is peculiar and compelling. It was commissioned for this exhibition, and Hartley is quoted saying that ‘I want the energy of these rocks to transfer into the viewer.’ The power of the Neolithic stones is apparent in these strange prints, which convey a magnetic field you can see, if not actually feel.
The landscape photographs of James Ravilious have a wild beauty to them, while Susan Derges’ Eden photograms made by ‘submerging photographic beneath the surface of river water and exposing it for a micro-second to a flashlight in night’s darkness’ look unearthly, like the surface of the moon. The metaphor of art literally absorbing, and submerged in, running water is appealing. Jo Bradford’s Cloud Forest (2011) offers multiple perspectives and details and is beautiful; Bradford comments that Dartmoor is, of course, a managed landscape, and nature is managed here, too, shaped into a series of backlit panels. Another work I particularly liked was Gary Fabrian Miller’s Breathing in the Beech Wood, Homeland, Dartmoor, Twenty Four Days of Sunlight (2004), which explores the colour cycle of beech leaves, from their lightest to their darkest as the tree ‘greens’.
The Museum has a large collection of magic lantern slides of Dartmoor, possibly used to provide a virtual tour in less technological times, and there are many standing stones and other features of the landscape here, providing a contrast, with different photographic techniques, yet featuring many of the same places, virtually unchanged. I’m still sifting through the images in my head, thinking about what art tells us about landscape, and vice versa; what landscape means, how we protect and conserve it, and what its value is to us are the questions underlying the whole exhibition.