ARTISTS TALKING

LAN2D is not primarily an exhibiting group. It is a discussion network engaged in various ways with the theoretical framing and evaluation of art practices concerned with ‘landscape’, and what this word means in the wake of The Boyle Family, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and psycho-geography. The group has a Janus-like identity. It operates against the digital grain in striving to address a perceived underestimation of such ‘traditional’ two-dimensional practices as painting, photography and printmaking. But at the same time, LAN2D is not opposed to hybrid or ‘new’ media. The members’ work is commensurately diverse, much of it teetering on the verge of moving into a three-dimensional, performative mode.

Part of this exhibition is devoted to artist’s books, including the exquisitely devised collaborative publications of Iain Biggs’ Wild Conversations Press. The text appended to this part of the exhibition is right to assert that “the contemporary artist’s book...is particularly suited to engaging with twenty-first century landscape”.

Other exhibitors include some estimable names – Michael Porter’s photographed/painted studies, and Sian Bonnell’s wonderful photographs of Stonehenge as bread soldiers and the Dorset Coast as peas and mash, for example – as well as artists who will be new to most viewers. Another factor uniting them is that they are all associated with HE institutions, either as lecturers or doctoral candidates. For good or ill, LAN2D is deeply immersed in the culture of academic fine art research.

Nevertheless, no career-curator has hi-jacked artists here to represent a contrived thesis about ‘the new landscape painting’, and the works in the exhibition are left to speak for themselves. But what makes a good discussion group does not necessarily make a compelling exhibition. Inevitably perhaps, the exhibition overall is no better or worse than the mixture of good and indifferent things that characterises, say, a studio group show.