Aspirational Bucolics

A solo exhibition of new artwork at Lungley Gallery, London. The work approaches the depiction of rural landscapes through three different strategies.

Firtsly, three 'paintings' produced through the traces left by moisture in drying household plaster surfaces construct a loose spatial narrative involving relationships between imaging technologies and the management of woodland. One painting depicts geofenced cattle employed by the Corporation of London to manage foliage in Epping Forest; one depicts a woodland scene in which the presence of a cyclist who had stopped to photograph bluebells has been erased by a neural(AI) filter; and a final one depicts a hand holding a blowtorch and a piece of toast on which a fictional curator or art historian has burnt an image of Monet's painting 'Flood Waters'. This last painting appears to be in curatorial limbo, having been removed from its mounting brackets. The temporary arrangement of timber, clamps and floor protection makes it appear to vaguely (and improbably) resemble a duck.

Intertwined with these (especially the toast image) are a set of objects which dramatise gallerist behaviour and audience competence. Outside the (2nd floor) gallery windows, two cheap but surprisingly realistic hunter's decoy ducks appear to be flying in to land, supposedly having confused the heavily-mediated (and unrecognisable to humans) depiction of Monet's painting with a real patch of flooded woodland. Every so often their wings spin (unsurprisingly unrealistic-looking to humans, but not to ducks, apparently). A loud realistic (but human-generated) quack is heard throughout the gallery at regular intervals. On the floor in a corner there is an in-use Starbucks coffee cup and a charging iphone, as if placed hastily by an invigilator or gallerist. On the screen of the iphone, a series of instagram stories show rally cars in rural environments disappearing into clouds of self-generated dust. Close scrutiny of the seemingly unconnected footage reveals that the wings of the ducks outside only spin when helicopters appear in the rally car footage, and each artificial quack is timed exactly to the animal-warning headlight flashes of the cars.

In a separate room, three quite low-resolution digital images depict bland landscape scenes: roadside barriers and blurred woodland beyond. These scenes are extracted from video footage of cycle races, and are the first frame of video immediately following the disappearance of a cyclist over the barrier during a crash, in which no trace of the cyclist or their bike can any longer be detected.

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