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GEOGRAPHY OF AN UNNAMED PLACE

© The Artist

GEOGRAPHY OF AN UNNAMED PLACE 1981

Nigel Hall (1943 – )

Details

Dimension
101 X 96 X 61 CM
Media
PAINTED ALUMINIUM
Accession number
P4199

Summary

The unnamed place referred to in this work, perhaps lacks a name because it is a little-known place; visited too infrequently to have established a recognisable identity. Perhaps it is still undiscovered, a world needed to balance an equation, waiting to make its appointed entrance. A mythic state? Or a state that borders our own world, a contiguous state. The entrance will be clear enough, like the entrance to a cave. We can see the cave as a dark feature of the landscape, a shadowy, if intangible reality of seemingly infinite depth. The world of imagination within the cave is defined by the rocks which frame it. Within and beyond prove irresistible. Light from a distant star arrives so late from another unknown place. Beyond the reach of knowing, or naming, ancient light. Within its shell, the sea snail fills and expands its home, while beyond, the oppressive ocean affects and modulates its growth. Energy from within and from without uniting to form the shell.

Aspects of British Art Today, The British Council and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, 1982

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.