Great Piece of Turf

Finlay Taylor curated ‘Great Piece of Turf’ at Danielle Arnaud, London (http://www.daniellearnaud.com) and published limited edition bookwork of commissioned pieces, combining digital and screen print technologies. Tate Britain and the National Art Library purchased the bookwork. The exhibition invited ten artists to explore notions of landscape. The brief asked participants to consider the following three references in their research: ‘Against Nature’ a text by Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Deliverance’ a film by James Boorman and ‘Cortez the Killer’ music and lyrics by Neil Young. The artists included Dalziel and Scullion, Peter Dukes, Denis Masi, Jem Southam and Sarah Woodfine. Their works agitate thinking about political, scientific and ecological issues and this emerged to fuse the show. It also emphasized how difficult it is, at this point in history, to divorce these notions from artists’ practice.The exhibition was named after Dürer’s watercolour ‘Das Grosse Rasenstück’ which is often considered as a starting point in observing ‘nature’ as a subject matter in a manner not connected to symbolism. From this standpoint it influenced science and artistic practice, which impacts on the exhibition works and contextualization. An important decision in selecting the artists was practice that revelled in details, but also contrasted visual minutiae with complex concepts. For example Kate Scrivener’s miniscule painted texts depict sea creatures but read as environmental phenomena and relate extraordinary accounts of human survival at sea. Phil Coy recreated life size pixels from a NASA photo-detail of central park, losing all notion of specifics beyond colour. Finlay Taylor’s work ‘British Butterflies and Moths' represented migratory Lepidoptera specimens from distant geographical locations, but identified within UK species identification guides as British species. The exhibition was reviewed in Contemporary (Contemporary, issue no 50, 2003, http://www.contemporary-magazine.com/reviews50_2.htm) by Ben Tuffnell curator at Tate Britain.