Elizabeth-Jane Grose

We are pleased to present Elizabeth-Jane Grose's new work in her ongoing series Living Landscapes (2024 - ) . Deeply rooted into the landscape of their making, and informed by the artist's experiences during the last 20 years of walking around the dramatic piece of Cornish coast surrounding Rock and the Camel Estuary, these works are the culmination of a long, slow and embodied process of making that begins at her nearby smallholding in North Cornwall. 

 

There, she grows the materials used to create the resulting responses to the landscape experienced in those walks. The wool, which forms the main material used in this series, comes from her small flock of rare breed sheep. She also grows the plants which she uses to create the dyes which colour these works; among them Woad, Nettle, Dandelion, Daffodil, Madder and other native plants. In this way, Grose's palette is tangibly Cornish, informed and created from the plants and flowers native to the Cornish soil.

 

Grose's landscapes, the result of a unique dedication to her raw materials, are constructed layer upon layer from wool, using ancient processes including spinning, carding, felting and dyeing to create surfaces which vividly evoke the movement and vivacity of the Cornish landscape. Grose's construction of landscape art, using practices usually associated with domesticity and folk traditions or assigned to the realm of so-called 'women's work', is a powerful statement of reclamation. The value of textile-based work has been widely eroded, derided and devalued during the last centuries and, at best, renegaded to the relam of Craft or Applied Arts. However, with the advent of artists such as Anni Albers, and later Sheila Hicks, textile-based work is now rightly being revisited not only as a powerful force in modernism and contemporary art, but as part of an ancient lineage that predates even ceramics. Indeed, textile art has been recognised as not only an ancient precursor to written langauge, but as a precursor to the Modernist Grid; a notion so dominant in the development of 20th century art. 

 

The complex inter-relationships which create our landscapes inhabit these works; millennia of humans, plants and animals living in fragile relationships which are constantly changing and today find themselves in unprecedented risk. Living Landscapes, created from peasant and gendered materials, therefore challenge these gender and class-based assumptions of artistic value, elevating the 'craft' element present in these works to the realm of contemporary art; urgent, timely and alive to the challenges of the time in which we live. The exhibition thus offers a contemporary reexamination of landscape from an artist whose practice acknowledges the current vulnerability of natural systems and the inherent political nature of the landscape.