Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape

Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape, a major new exhibition exploring the connection artists have to Dartmoor's evocative landscape through photography, film and Land Art.

Revealing artists’ obsessions, dreams, imagination, and preoccupations with its landscape, ‘Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape’ opens in Autumn 2024 at RAMM in Exeter. Showing many previously unseen works, this exhibition shares the ways artists have been drawn to Dartmoor and used photography, film and Land Art to explore radical or alternative approaches to living and making art. Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape is presented by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery (RAMM).

Showing works made between 1969 to 2024, Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape is a major new exhibition at RAMM. It responds and engages directly with Dartmoor as an evocative landscape and microcosm, from the interconnected ecological and climate crises and deep time to urgent issues like land use and access rights.Many of the exhibiting artists live or have repeatedly visited Dartmoor and identify very strongly with the landscape, holding a deep knowledge of and spiritual connection to the land through making work there. Dartmoor has been a National Park since 1951 and 37% is common land.Influential conceptual land artworks from the 1960s by artists including Nancy Holt and Richard Long, provide a starting point and context for the exhibition. The other artists are Marie Yates, James Ravilious, Chris Chapman, Fern Leigh Albert, Jo Bradford, Robert Darch, Siân Davey, Tanoa Sasraku, Nicholas J R White, David Spero, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller, Laura Hopes and Kathryn Earnshaw who work together.

Lara Goodband, Contemporary Art Curator said: “Richard Long has walked across Dartmoor throughout his life, a practice that both informs and is his art. It's how many of us experience this landscape, walking across open moorland between granite tors. Curating this show is both a privilege but also a responsibility to RAMM’s visitors, many of whom have their own relationship to this very special place. Like them, the artists represented in the exhibition feel a strong emotional and spiritual connection to living, experimenting and creating on the moor. In the late 1960s, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt visited and made experimental work together at Wistman’s Wood. Recently Dartmoor has become synonymous with the National Park’s legal battle to retain wild camping. My hope is that this exhibition’s attention to urgent issues will bring renewed re-focus to this ‘wild’ place, a landscape that stimulates debate and continues to inspire creativity.”

The commissioned artists are based in Devon; internationally renowned installation artist Alex Hartley and filmmaker Ashish Ghadiali. They have been visiting the museum’s stores, talking with RAMM’s specialist curators, and researching its Dartmoor-related collections including geology, archaeology, photography and magic lantern slides.

Alex Hartley said: “I have an ongoing relationship with Dartmoor through climbing, walking and camping. Recently I’ve been experimenting in the studio combining nature photography with sculptural elements incorporating solar panels and photographic lighting rigs – attempting to directly activate and energise images of ‘supernature’ and sacred prehistoric sites. This commission for RAMM allows me to focus on refining and completing these works, directly connecting the magic of photography with the magic of Dartmoor.”

Ashish Ghadiali said: “For me, the last few years have been a period of intense and interdisciplinary engagement with the landscapes of South Devon where I live and with what connects us here to the life of the planet. In that, the story of Land Art has, throughout, been a constant point of reflection and inspiration. ‘Cinematics of Gaia and Magic’ is a 2-screen film installation that reflects on the experiments of Gaia theorist James Lovelock that took place on the edge of Dartmoor during the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on conversations that I had with Lovelock around a year before he died at the age of 103, it asks how we might perceive the sense of the earth as a single and unified system”.

Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape is showing at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter from 19 October 2024 to 23 February 2025. There will be an extensive events programme of talks and workshops alongside the exhibition.