Back out on that road again

This one person exhibition documented Evans' investigation into notions of aspiration and upward mobility in a British suburban context through the application of a painterly visual language.

Although the project identified the role of leisure and hobbies and emphasized the link between gender and suburbia, the notion of the suburbs as a hybridized space (the marriage of town and country) was the predominant preoccupation. The project was concerned with the development of a painterly language to describe notions of suburban leisure and articulate the constructed reality of the suburban hybridized topography.

Although Evans' research often resides in the British suburbs, archetypal North American landscapes repeatedly act as sites for aspiration. Photographic documentation, initially collated during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada and in subsequent trips to North America and within Britain, form the basis of drawings and paintings, through which a meticulous and painterly approach to schematic mark making was investigated.

'Back out on that road again'was Evans' second solo exhibition. It marked the outcome of research conducted over a 12 month period which was supported by an award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Geraint Evans Research Statement:

It is the perception of landscape as something both familiar and exotic, a construction of memory and fantasy, a harbinger of myth and history and a sum of images both false and superficial (WJT Mitchell 1994: 263) that has informed my recent practice which encompasses narrative driven paintings and drawings. The writer Lisa le Favre has argued that the "idea of what landscape should be is bound up with the ways in which it is represented back to us through culture, be it painting, photography, film, literature or television", bound up in architypes and conventions (le Fauvre 2000: 89).

In his introduction to 'Landscape and Memory' Simon Schama writes that the 'wilderness was as much the product of culture's craving and culture's framing as any other imagined garden. 'Referencing Yosemite National park he observes how, despite the snack bars and car parks that service the visitor, we still imaging the landscape as the depopulated wilderness depicted by the photographs of Watkins and Adams and the paintings of Bierstadt and Moran. He continues:

The very act of identifying (not to mention photographing) the place presupposes our presence, and along with us all the heavy cultural backpacks that we lug with us on the trail.' (Schama 1995: 7)

Tourism encourages the pursuit of the 'authentic' experience and often promises an encounter with the 'natural' landscape. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio write: "often a sight must struggle to resemble its expected image.the postcard [for example] has become the fixed referent after which the mutable sight models itself. "(Diller and Scofidio 2005: 103)

Within the city, daily encounters with nature take the guise of domestic gardens or the man made approximations of natural landscapes in high streets and shopping malls, where fig trees, fibreglass crags, pebbles and bark chippings form a now familiar hybridized landscape, with marble, glass and stainless steel.

Whilst writing about the work of Dan Holdsworth, Angus Carlyle used the term 'synthetic nature' to describe the contemporary urban and suburban landscape, where 4x4's (named 'Voyager', 'Explorer' and 'Range Rover') guided by GPS systems and driven by well prepared individuals in techno-fibre clothing, roam no further than the out of town shopping mall, which after all might be suggestively named Lakeside or Bluewater. (Carlyle 2000: 7-11)

My practice aims to utilize painterly narrative fiction to further understand our relationship with nature, how we might attempt to shape or simulate landscape in order to form something idealistically 'natural', framed within an urban or suburban context.

• http://www.wimbledon.arts.ac.uk/35279.ht...