The Landscape Room

The Landscape Room featured paintings by Mark Fairnington that are poised between the observed and the remembered, functioning in the gap between what we see and what we know. The paintings began as a commission in 2018 for Cherryburn, the birthplace of the artist Thomas Bewick, reflecting the landscape and its history. The works connected with the historic context of Cherryburn to evoke a sense of local identity and cultural continuity. They examined how a subjective response to the landscape can be framed within a collective experience, shaped by our knowledge of the history of landscape painting. The Landscape Room was be designed to show the paintings as a single installation, echoing the way they were exhibited at Cherryburn. They were made to look as if they were meant to be there, as if they were always meant to be there.

The paintings explore how our contemporary perception of the landscape is framed by our experience of historical images of the Landscape. The paintings in The Landscape Room were based upon multiple photographs taken on walks through the countryside, recording different moments in time. These images were combined in the paintings where an obsessive description of surfaces fills the picture plane, the brushwork generating a restless anxiety; nature in motion, unfixed and ungraspable. The Landscape Room paintings frames this visual energy within the architecture of a Georgian living room.

• https://handelstreetprojects.com/mark-fa...