OTHER WATERS
OTHER WATERS, 2019, is a permanent sculpture installed within Kearsney Abbey Park. The sculpture displays a mould taken of tidal pattern taken during low-tide.
The work is intended to reflect the cultural and ecological processes of the area through a metaphor of change symbolised by the flow of the river and the tide of the sea. The project will also act to connect Kearsney to Dover and the surrounding coastline, and will provide a permanent feature for the parks for years to come
Installed 2020
COMMISSIONED BY DOVER ARTS DEVELOPMENT in association with Dover District Council.
pictured; Goodwin Sands ©Elegaer
Co-Innovation (curatorial project)
CO-INNOVATION, a new centre supporting start-up businesses and community integration in Dover, requires a newly commissioned and curated series of internal and external public artworks reflecting a positive and innovative ethos.
Three sites have been selected for the artworks; twelve external panels on the front facade of the building, eleven concreted external panels around the northern wall of the building, and one large scale internal mural.
The artworks are intended to attract new businesses and promote a positive, progressive, and inclusive message for the Warehouse. We can achieve this though following the three key values of Dover Big Local; To Unify, To Energise, To Inspire. The three project sites each reflect one of these vales and together echo the ethos of Dover Big Local.
✓Six commissioned artists
✓three open call competitions
✓all submissions included into one large mural
✓investing £2000 paid directly to artists in Dover
See the commissioned artworks here.
COMMISSIONED BY DOVER BIG LOCAL
pictured; ©Joanna Jones
CLASSICAL REMAINS
CLASSICAL REMAINS will show work selected from a private collection and explores the influence of classicism through neo-classical and conceptual practices. The exhibition shows work from seven artists, both contemporary and historical. Etchings after the seventeenth century landscape painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain explore the resurgence of classism during the Enlightenment and Baroque periods. Ian Hamilton Finlay, an artist inspired by these two artists, used the garden as an artistic medium and his diverse and complex output is widely recognised as a crucial development in 20th century art.
The exhibition also shows work from four living artists. Stephen Bann CBE, FBA is the Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol and University of Kent, Canterbury. Gary Hincks is an illustrator who worked with Ian Hamilton Finlay throughout his life and whose work is included in most major museums around the world. Joseph Black and Antoine Espinasseau are two young contemporary artists working in both painting and sculpture exploring the classical tradition and its relevance today.
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
STEPHEN BANN - JOSEPH BLACK - ANTOINE ESPINASSEAU - IAN HAMILTON FINLAY - GARY HINCKS - CLAUDE LORRAIN - NICOLAS POUSSIN
28-29 APRIL 2018
10-6
CURATED BY JOSEPH BLACK
pictured; Antoine Espinasseau
Reflections on the Landscape: Against the tide
Reflections on the Landscape: Against the tide will be the inaugural exhibition held at the recently opened River Garage Studios. The exhibition will show work from nine artists based in Dover.
Each artist voluntarily submitted work to be included in the exhibition. The only criteria for their selection was that they lived and worked in Dover and the surrounding area. As a result their work has been influenced by the unique visual and cultural history of the town. Dover is moulded by its tide, a place always bringing in new life and ideas, as well as a place shaped and defined by its history. It is a town as relevant today as it has ever been. Through bringing these artists together we can reflect on the influence of place and environment on their work; whether economic, cultural, visual or ecological.
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
KATE BEAUGIE - JOSEPH BLACK - DREW BURRETT - SAMUEL CAPELL - PAUL DAGYS - BENJAMIN HUNT - JOANNA JONES - CLARE SMITH - MIKE TEDDER
24-25 February 2018
10-6
CURATED BY JOSEPH BLACK AND LOUISE WEBB
pictured; Kate Beaugie, Dark Tide, 2017
Asphodels
This photographic series focuses on the enduring motif of the White Asphodel (Asphodelus Albus). The image of the Asphodel Meadows is most associated with Homer’s poetic tradition of describing the meadows of the afterlife.
SOLO EXHIBITION
The Garden at War: Deception, Craft and Reason at Stowe
"An extraordinary, profusely illustrated, impressively informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking study that is unreservedly recommended." - Midwest Book Review
Stowe isn’t a garden of flowers or shrubs; it’s a garden of ideas. This important new collection of essays and artwork brings together reactions from some of the leading thinkers on landscape design, exploring the gardens at Stowe as a site of conflict between order and disorder, and comparing them with Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta.
Accompanying an exhibition of historic and contemporary art at Stowe House, The Garden at War explores the gardens at Stowe, built by a general, as a site of perpetual conflict. Here the preconditions of destruction and creation are inescapable. If nature is understood to be original, then the garden is an ordered but un-orderly condition – a re-ordered vision of the natural order, a vision of nature disciplined by human action in a attempt to advance and yield control.
At Stowe, two hundred and fifty acres of carefully maintained gardens offer a complex web of views, pathways, statues, inscriptions, urns and ideas. Unlike its French floricultural precursors, Stowe presents sudden shifts of scene, abrupt revelations, as well as spots at which to stop to absorb the visual effect. There is natural beauty in the gardens of Stowe, but they serve a larger purpose than to please the eye. Beneath this facade of bucolic idyll lies a deeply important suggestion of man’s relationship to nature.
Starting with works by the preeminent neoclassical painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain – whose distinct pictorial visions gave rise to an unmistakable relationship between the garden, the viewer and the natural world – the publication brings together an arrangement of interpretations and theories exploring metaphors and meanings within the very practice of gardening itself. An introduction by the pre-eminent critic Stephen Bann and essays by Joseph Black and the foremost garden historian John Dixon Hunt lead on to newly commissioned illustrations by artist Gary Hincks, a previously unpublished interview with the Scottish conceptual artist and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay, and a new discussion of conflict in the work of Richard Long.
Contributors
Joseph Black is an emerging artist and writer; Stephen Bann is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol and has written extensively on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay; John Dixon Hunt is Emeritus Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Graduate School of Design and is widely acknowledged as a foremost scholar on garden and landscape design; John Stathatos is a Greek writer and photographer specializing in thirdworld conflict; Joy Sleeman is an art historian whose research embraces aspects of the histories of sculpture and landscape design.
EDITED BY JOSEPH BLACK
The Garden at War: Deception, Craft and Reason
Accompanying a publication of the same title and a day-long series of talks by world-leading art historians, The Garden at War explores the gardens at Stowe as a site of metaphors, performance, ideas, and perpetual conflict. The exhibition brings together interpretations from some of the leading thinkers on landscape design, including work from Antoine Espinasseau, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, as well as the exhibition’s Senior Curator Joseph Black. Through these artists work we can explore the gardens at Stowe, as well as Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, as sites of conflict between order and disorder.
Stowe is widely held to be one of the greatest cultural achievements of the eighteenth century, incorporating work from the greatest garden designers of the day, from William Kent to ‘Capability’ Brown. Yet unlike most gardens, Stowe isn’t a garden of flowers or shrubs; it’s a garden of ideas. 250 acres of carefully maintained landscape gardens offer a complex web of views, pathways, statues, inscriptions, urns and ideas. Unlike its French floricultural precursors, Stowe presents sudden shifts of scene, abrupt revelations, as well as spots at which to stop to absorb the visual effect. There is natural beauty in the gardens of Stowe, but they serve a larger purpose than to please the eye. Beneath this facade of bucolic idyll lies a deeply important suggestion of man’s relationship to nature. Like any garden, it must be maintained and its ordered, controlled, and contained vision of nature upheld.
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
JOSEPH BLACK - ANTOINE ESPINASSEAU - IAN HAMILTON FINLAY - CLAUDE LORRAIN - NICOLAS POUSSIN
Stowe House, Buckingham, MK18 5EH
8 July - 9 September 2017
10 - 4 daily
CURATED BY JOSEPH BLACK
The Courtauld Symposium at Stowe 2017
Join us this Summer at Stowe House as The Courtauld Institute of Art presents a day-long series of talks held to open the exhibition The Garden at War.
Bringing together world-leading art-historians and contemporary artists the collaborative event aims to provide an enlightening and enjoyable day for all. The talks will explore the issues and ideas raised by the exhibition on the development and relevance of Stowe and its history of neoclassicism.
The primary strand of inquiry which informs the day concerns the work of the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay and the use of the gardens at Stowe as a collaborative art-form. Looking at Stowe in this manner it is possible to read its design through a number of different frameworks; from the influence of the classical world, to the work of conceptual artists, to the Enlightenment and the French landscape paintings of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain.
Contributors
Joseph Black is an emerging artist and writer; Stephen Bann is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol and has written extensively on the w