Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape
Royal Albert Memorial Museum
October 19, 2024
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February 23, 2025
Dartmoor exists in the cultural imagination as a place of freedom and wilderness, but it is also a contested landscape and a microcosm of urgent issues facing Britain today. Concerns about the interconnected ecological crisis and climate breakdown, as well as who has access to the land, are explored by artists through collaborations with climate scientists, protestors and other experts. The artworks shown offer new ways of appreciating and understanding Dartmoor’s special landscape through time and consider its future.Katharine Earnshaw, Associate Professor in Classics, Exeter University said: “As a Latinist, I can't help but be aware of the Latin roots to the word ‘radical’ - that it means roots …we often use radical now as something that means more progressive or even transgressive.”
RAMM has become the custodian of various objects found in, made and inspired by Dartmoor. The exhibition premieres commissions by Devon-based artists Alex Hartley and Ashish Ghadiali. Their research into the museum’s collections of historical photography and artefacts prompted their artistic explorations of Dartmoor’s deep time and ecology.
Alex Hartley’s commission for the show is inspired by his feelings towards the power of Dartmoor’s standing stones and its landscape of deep time. He says, “For this new work, I took photographs of selected standing stones and isolated them from their original context. I then placed them onto recycled solar panels where they are floated into an imagined photographic cosmos. Each solar panel is flooded with resin, bonding and combining the resonant power of each stone with the potential power of the solar panel. Instead of simply representing power and energy I want these works to hold and vibrate with actual power and energy.”
Exploring conceptual approaches to art, Richard Long, Nancy Holt and Marie Yates used photography in the 1960s as both a means of documentation of an event or land artwork and as a trace of their journey through the Dartmoor landscape.Within the documentary photography tradition, Chris Chapman and James Ravilious’s photographs tell stories about life on Dartmoor and record changing customs. Contemporary photographer Fern Leigh Albert documents protests during the ongoing campaign to retain wild camping rights.Scientists agree that the UK is now the most nature depleted area of Europe which has led to debates about how land is managed and who has access to it. Tanoa Sasraku’s foraging for earth pigments and re-use of materials point to her ‘call for conservation’ which she explores through otherworldly, even magical connections to nature and our entanglement with it. Artist Jo Bradford has developed a plant-based seal for her prints that incorporates locally produced beeswax and is nurturing willow trees to manage waste from her Dartmoor studio sustainably.Garry Fabian Miller and Susan Derges have experimented with camera-less techniques. Derges has often worked outside, using the Dartmoor landscape at night as both studio and darkroom, while Fabian Miller developed darkroom techniques to create semi-abstract images that express his experience of living and walking on the moor. Fabian Miller rarely leaves the eight-mile radius from his home, an area where he finds inspiration and calls ‘Crucible’.Universal themes are found in Robert Darch’s images of the Ten Tors Challenge, which describe a rite of passage for young people, while Sian Davey’s photographs focus on her local stretch of the river Dart drawing attention to communities of nurture and an almost spiritual connection with waterways. Nicholas J.R. White grew up on Dartmoor, carrying Dartmoor with him as he explored new landscapes.For artist Laura Hopes and academic Katharine Earnshaw Dartmoor became their studio for thinking, discussing and making a collaborative ‘collaged book’ and memoir about how the ethics of friendship might help thinking about the environmental crisis and our relationship with the land. David Spero’s series ‘Settlements’ documents the Steward Community Woodland, in Devon. His series charts its evolution up to 2019, when permanent planning permission was refused, and the seven resident households were forced to dismantle all non-agricultural buildings and leave the woods.Commissioned artist Ashish Ghadiali has made a film ‘Cinematics of Gaia and Magic’ inspired by a conversation with the Gaia theorist James Lovelock in the final year of his life. It features lantern slides from RAMM’s collection alongside the artist in the cold waters of a fast, flowing pool on the river Dart while improvising a melody for the words ‘Can you tell the time of a running river?’
Lara Goodband, Contemporary Art Curator said: “With its open spaces, ancient woodland and layered traces of human activity, Dartmoor has long attracted artists, often depicting the landscape as a picturesque rural idyll and is home to a thriving artistic community, whose work is recognised internationally. It is also a contested landscape and a microcosm of urgent issues facing Britain today. The fifty-five years the artwork in the exhibition spans invites us to consider our relationship with the specific landscape of Dartmoor, the changes during that time and what we would like to see and be able to experience in the future. Attracted by a particular presence in the Dartmoor landscape, these artists have used photography to capture their personal and emotional connections to this special place. What we see, in variety, form and approach, are links to the otherworldly and non-human.”
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