Trees and Other Objects

Abstract

This is an artists’ book, published by Singular Publishing to coincide with a two-person exhibition of the same name at the Fairhurst Gallery in Norwich from 16 June to 5 August 2017. The aim of the publication (produced entirely independently of the gallery) was to make a lasting and more substantial record of our work that would also contextualize it more fully. To this end, we thought with care about the public profile of the book. This 48-page publication has a foreword by Amanda Gieitner, Director of the East Anglia Art Fund, which explicitly situates our work in the context of Constable, the Norwich School of Painters, and more recent East Anglian landscape photographers such as Mark Edwards and Frances Kearney (both of whose works are represented in the collection of Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery). The publisher we approached was chosen with similar care. Singular Publishing was in 2017 a new initiative from Charlie Watson, who previously ran East Publishing, well known for its prestigious and award-winning exhibition catalogues for the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery among others. Trees and Other Objects also included an essay (pp. 5-11) in which I situated our research-led practices in relation to the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari, James Elkins, Robert Macfarlane, PeterOsborne, Robert Smithson and others. The book included eighteen colour reproductions of my work, including work from the Scapeland series. By raising awareness of the landscape-related dimension of my practice, the book led directly to an invitation to join the national Land2 research network in 2018, and to an invitation to show work from the Scapeland series in the 2019 exhibition Radical Landscapes: Innovation in Landscape and Language Art, curated by Camilla Nelson.