Nature and Nation: Vaster than Empires

'Nature and Nation: Vaster than Empires' was a national, touring exhibition, publication and internet project linking schools in the UK and India. Our question was how our activities as artists, as cultural producers, might both be a method for examining the realities of the world we live in, and a strategy for intervening in that world.

Artists were asked to examine contested geographic and symbolic territories and explore the representation of nature in relation to colonial histories and national identity.

A related publication examined the way nature is culturally constructed, aesthetically represented, and expressed. It covered topics like the colonising aesthetic of the lawn, and the experience of nature as ornament and included images of work exhibited.

The schools internet project was devised to link the rarefied field of aesthetic representation and cultural discourse to the lived realities of different communities. The project succeeded in creating an international network of social, theoretical and visual relationships and audience responses.

Polly Gould

Research Interests

Landscape and the sublime
Contemporary fine art
Drawing
Performance and narratives
Public art and remembrance
Mourning and Melancholia in the arts
Relating theory to practice and the visual to the verbal.
Antarctica
Death
Representations of nature

Current Research

I work with drawing, sound, video and performance. I combine drawing and writing in installation works that also examine the narrative urge in our lives; the things we say to each other, the way we end up quoting favourite books, living our lives like scenes from films, or finding the words of a popular song to do our talking for us. I explore the 'writing oneself backwards' of autobiography and the work of memory. My work is concerned with our relationships as speaking subjects exploring questions of voice, power and desire, and presented in a live form as performance lectures of performance video works. I was short-listed for Jerwood Drawing Prize 2007, and had my short story included in The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B, a collection of fiction by contemporary British artists, in 2006.
I also collaborate with Anne Eggebert as Eggebert and Gould. We work on public art commissions, site-specific works and exhibition curation. We engage with the history and architecture of a place in order to uncover forgotten stories. We are currently researching Landscape and Anxiety in contemporary fine art practice with the view to developing a touring exhibition. We are interested in sustainability, representations of nature and landscape, and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Anne Eggebert

Research Interests

Eggebert's site-specific and situated practice, uses video, photography, drawing and installation to explore national cultural identity and the articulation of landscape.

Current Research

Eggebert's practice explores the complexities of cultural identity, particularly the deconstruction of the notion of Englishness. Located within the framework of site-specific and situated practice, and using video, photography, drawing and installation, her work critiques the role of authoritative devices in the construction and projection of national cultural identity.

Eggebert is developing a body of work that explores the concept of the 'betweeness of place' (Entrikin 1991) and our facility in the 21stC to describe landscape. Key to this research are the ideas of place as anecdotal and how our understanding of place can both be disrupted and enhanced through the process of teletechnologies (Virilio 2006) i.e. through speed and slowness - and the impact of these on the imagining of nature and the cultural articulation of landscape. How the distinction between finding and losing one's sense of place might be blurred is key to her reinterrogation of landscape.

Eggebert's recent video work Chigwell Row Wood for Border Dialogues (the second of her Epping Forest Arts and ACE funded commissions) reveals what the woodland means to local people, and place as spatio-temporal event (Massey 2005). Members of the local community - those who use and shape the forest - were asked to describe their landscape. Most struggle to describe the forest, the topographical features, the aesthetic and material nature of the woodland, and turn to their narratives revealing how they and others activate the space.

The first of these EFA commissions, Matching Green, asked community members of a rural Essex village to describe their landscape - the village green. Similarly they turn to the anecdotal. The green, a space of soft edges, is revealed as a theatre of change and, paradoxically, permanence - the precious and fragile heart of the village.

Eggebert has shown at Aine Art Gallery, Finland, at Kettle's Yard and Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (in collaboration with Julian Walker), the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, Southampton City Art Gallery, Tate St Ives, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and RCA. She studied Critical Fine Art Practice at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and MAFA Media at the Slade and now teaches at Central Saint Martins.

• http://www.pollygould.co.uk
• http://www.anne-eggebert.com
• http://www.virtualherbarium.net