Henrietta Simson: Reimagining Wilderness

Taking the Cornish landscape and the site of Tremenheere especially as a starting point, the works in this exhibition explore how the transformative values attributed to the wilderness in medieval and early Renaissance paintings can develop contemporary definitions of landscape.

The landscapes of Cornwall are habitually seen through a touristic lens, as places of leisure and aesthetic pleasure. Instead, the works emphasise landscape as time (history), presence, embodiment and materiality in an exploration shaped by the material and spiritual dimensions of wilderness. They map the metals and minerals of Cornish extraction to their symbolic meanings within medieval painting, finding resonance between the clay pit and the desert, exploring the dual history of mining and pilgrimage contained within the Cornish landscape. Through themes of land, sky and water, they question the visual realism that has structured the idea of landscape for centuries in the west, presenting Cornish heritage as central to rethinking the functions of landscape today.

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