Flights of fancy … the suburban Essex landscape

Artists Sarah Cole and Anne Eggebert present their works Chigwell Row Wood, Nest, and Folly to critically reassess the interface between reproduction and reception in the construction of the contemporary landscape. Ancient managed woodland, a Basildon primary school, and Valentines Mansion historic house and gardens were their starting points; reflecting on these works the artists considered how their engagement with suburban landscape negotiates issues of participation in, and production of, socio-aesthetic landscape through dialogic processes and the capturing of performative responses to community, place and space.

A man reflects upon his feral childhood whilst sitting amongst recently lopped forest trees, a mother writes words with soil upon the gymnasium floor, and a young man flies across the photographic plane, a freerunner challenging the surfaces of the historic folly.

Taking the example of Flatford Mill, they consider how the landscape image (Constable’s paintings) mediates and reproduces the ‘real’ worked environment – requiring of the visitor a certain complicity of performance and visualisation of place. These reflections form the basis of their presentation; on how the recently restored historic leisure landscape of Valentines Mansion might be understood through the emergence of new modes of spectatorship, performed in response to contemporary ways of seeing.

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