Figuring Landscapes brings together artists' moving images from the UK and Australia around themes of landscape curated by Catherine Elwes and Steven Ball. Screening programmes will be complemented by an international symposium at Tate Modern and a series of workshops at ArtSway in the New Forest. The programmes will tour the UK before travelling to Australia where they will be exhibited at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art and the DELL Gallery in Brisbane. Figuring Landscapes is funded by Arts Council England.

For more information on Figuring Landscapes please see the website: www.figuringlandscapes.co.uk

A number of the Australian artists exhibiting in Figuring Landscapes are involved with the Broken Hill Art Exchange in Broken Hill, NSW, Australia. A link to their website can be found here

Preview Evening and Gallery Talk: Catherine Elwes, Steven Ball and Mike Latto in Conversation
Tuesday 25 November 2008 at 7pm
Figuring Landscapes curators and artists Catherine Elwes and Steven Ball, accompanied by New Forest based and participating artist Mike Latto, will discuss the ideas behind the screening programme, and how landscape is imagined and experienced through the moving image in both Australia and the UK.
FREE: Booking Essential.

To book a place on the above event please contact Jack Lewis on 01590 682260 (ext.16) or email: jack.lewis@artsway.org.uk

Figuring Landscapes is supported by

Selected Artists:

Gallery One:

William Raban, Civil Disobedience, 2004, 3 min, UK
A frenetic, time-lapse journey from the capital to the sea is achieved in just a few minutes and is accompanied by a pulsating soundtrack in which Margaret Thatcher’s speech justifying the sinking of the Belgrano in the Falklands War is sampled and reformatted by the composer David Cunningham.

Mike Latto, 311, 2007, 10 min, UK
An ambitious project to reinstate the eroded beach at Bournemouth involved pumping 19,500 metric tons of sand back onto the shore. Latto records the somewhat sinister night-time manoeuvres that restored the beach and contrasts them with the peaceful day-time scene populated by walkers and holidaymakers.

Brendan Lee, Proving Ground, 2007, 4 min extract, Australia
The Australian obsession with cars and test-driving is linked to the brotherhood of drinkers who must prove their masculinity at the bar as well as behind the wheel. Echoes of Mad Max and outback lawlessness combine with a sense of generalised fury letting loose beyond the city boundaries.

David Theobald, Greensleeves, 2007, 5 min, UK
An animated ice cream van’s tinkling rendition of Greensleeves is activated each time the vehicle manages to edge forward a few feet in a motorway jam. The anthem of Englishness is neatly juxtaposed with the nightmare of motorway driving, which nowadays serves as a standard experience of country for many British citizens.

Eugenia Lim, Young American, 2005, 4 min, Australia
Lim satirises what she sees as a latent xenophobia in Australian culture by releasing her ‘inner Bowie’ whilst paying tribute to the ‘fearless experimentalism’ of European feminist performance artists.

Bronwyn Platten, Meeting Nude Woman Walking on Balls (after Hans Baldung Grien, 1514), 2006, 4 min extract, Australia
A naked woman walking on balls strapped to her feet re-enacts a drawing by Flemish artist Hans Baldung Grien. Transposed to the unforgiving terrain of Ochre Point in South Australia, she becomes an image of vulnerability and an emblem of a settler presence, making painstaking progress in a symbolic act of colonisation.

Anna Cady, Farms of Innocence, 2007, 2 min, UK
Despite the environmental warning underlying Cady’s charmingly child-friendly animation, its joyous humour lightens its message and in her use of Edward Lear’s nonsense poem, The Duck and the Kangaroo, she offers the possibility of redemption.

Vernon Ah Kee, Cant Chant (Wegrewhere), 2007, 4:20 min, Australia
Athletic Indigenous ‘dudes’ re-appropriate a white surfers’ paradise while the ghosts of colonial history play across the underside of a surfboard bearing a photograph of Ah Kee’s grandfather captured by the anthropologist Norman Tindale in the 1920s. Ah Kee will represent Australia at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Peter Callas, Night's High Noon: An Anti-Terrain, 1988, 7:26 min, Australia
Callas’s intricate 1988 animation parades the iconographic symbols that came to define Australian identity. Completed in Australia’s bicentenary year, the video captures much of the tensions of that time, tensions that persist to this day.

Roz Cran, Stone, 2008, 4 min, UK
An absurdist humour combines with a serious attempt to “get closer to things in the world” by physically embodying a feature of the landscape, by becoming a stone.

Sergio Cruz, Animalz, 2006, 4 min, UK
Animalz is an exuberant fantasy in which boys emerge from the sea, like the original amphibians and colonise a forest, marking out their territory in a break-dance celebration of Nature and her feral sons.

Hobart Hughes, Removed, 2005, 6 min, Australia
The shadow of a man takes on a life of its own as it struggles between a desire to embrace the natural environment and its ability to destroy it. Inspired by Murnau’s Nosferatu, Removed is a parable of the dark day of the soul and respite is only found as the sun sets and the troubled shadow retreats.

Sofia Dahlgren, Winter Light, 2005, 4 min, UK
An imaginary winter landscape opens up the realms of symbolism and timeless dreaming. The meditative stasis of painting is recreated in the slow pace of the video while the finely worked digital surface reminds us that landscape is a cultural, man-made phenomenon.

Matt Hulse, Sine Die, 1994, 4 min, UK
The figure of the artist executes a time-lapse dance along a rugged seashore. His frenetic rush from rock to rock is part pantheistic hymn to the sea, part Pythonesque tribute to the inherited English madness that seeks out nature as a backdrop to eccentric rituals.

Tammy Honey, iBeach, 2007, 4 min, Australia
Australian beach culture underpins national identity and here, a young iPod performer sings over a muted pop song framed by the glorious coastline in Port Phillip Bay where the Australian Impressionists forged the first nationalist art movement.

Daniel Crooks, Static No. 10 (falling as a means of rising), 2007, 3:55 min, Australia
By means of sophisticated digital ‘time-slicing’, Crooks unravels our notion of the time-space continuum and hints at hidden rhythms in the landscape as well as deeper levels of human subjectivity.

Nick Collins, Tidemills, 2002, 10 min, UK
A beach in Newhaven on the Sussex coast is the setting for this elegant visual essay. Details of the beach give the view close to the ground, at arm’s length, while the aspirations of horizon interweave the meditation on place.

David Perry, Interior with Views, 1975, 5 min, Australia
A view through a window in stark black and white recalls the early days of video technology. The use of the window frame reflects Perry’s painterly concerns and the traditions of depicting landscape through the determining structure of a frame. Without a frame, landscape is only a wilderness.

Mike Marshall, Days Like These, 2003, 5 min, UK
The rhythmic clicking of a garden sprinkler counts out the duration of a long summer afternoon in a perfectly manicured garden. The clipped hedges and rose beds act as a template of suburban gentility exported and reproduced as English garden design in every corner of the Empire.

Gallery 2

Shaun Gladwell, Approach to Mundi Mundi, 2007, 8:37 min, Australia
A leather-clad biker greets the sun, arms outstretched in a Christ-like posture. This symbolic embrace of nature tempers outback brigand-machismo while the two-wheeled technological toy gleams its enticements of freedom and the open road. Shaun Gladwell will be representing Australia at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Hollington & Kyprianou, CCTV Monitor 1, 2003, 3:30 min, UK
A mysterious journey is undertaken to an unknown destination as nightriders and drivers ease down midnight motorways. A post-apocalyptic atmosphere hovers above the cosy sleepiness of English lanes and hedgerows like a B-movie ‘darkest hour’.

John Conomos, Lake George (after Mark Rothko), 2008, 7 min extract, Australia
Following Jean-François Lyotard’s contention that “…landscape is beyond the cultivated zone”, Conomos evokes the beauty of Lake George in a series of immersive, painterly abstractions.

Dan Shipsides, Coir’ a’ Ghrunnda 360, 2007, 2 min, UK
A kind of existential performance of man and camera on a remote Scottish mountain recreates the experience of ‘being there’ while simultaneously disrupting the frame of conventional representations of landscape.

Patricia Piccinini, Sandman, 2002, 4:10 min, Australia
Through the image of an amphibian girl, Piccinini calls for us to love all our creations, even the ‘undesired outcomes’ of technological advances. Invoking the Aboriginal commitment to ancestors as well as to future generations, Piccinini equates such a duty of care with the care of country.

Emily Richardson, Petrolia, 2004, 7 min extract, UK
Imminently redundant oil drilling platforms are towed back and forth like Meccano toys in a time-lapsed series of observations of Cromarty Firth in Scotland. Richardson’s film documents the decline of another UK industry while creating a visually sumptuous display.

Susan Norrie & David Mackenzie, Twilight, 2006, 9:33 min, Australia
Twilight documents the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a subversive architecture of protest that embodies and accommodates Aboriginal activism and rights for Indigenouspeople.

Dominic Redfern, HEAT, 2007, 5 min, Australia
The Mallee district, a source of inspiration for Australian painters is revisited in close-up. The tangled remains of dead foxes evoke the colonial history of introduced species as well as early settlers’ struggles for survival.

David Mackenzie, Where the Crow Flies Backwards, 2006, 6:50 min, Australia
A dark dream of a sombre landscape provides the setting for the eponymous bird to ply back and forth between tree and modern communication tower. The symbolism of death lies heavy on its wings while the representation of the landscape struggles to maintain its material form in the digital age.

Genevieve Staines, Ruins in Reverse, 2005, 5 min, Australia
A deceptively simple technique of systematically erasing the architecture of Brisbane from its surrounding landscape touches on deeper issues of conservation and survival in the Australian environment. The revenge of nature is ready to undo the work of civilisation.

Semiconductor, All the Time in the World, 2005, 5 min, UK
A geological time frame is rendered in human seconds and minutes while the convolutions of the earth are enacted in ‘reel’ time. Part magic, part science this engaging work maintains a sense of wonder at the miraculous transformations of nature.

Sarah Dobai, Nettlecombe, 2007, 7 min, UK
Following in the deconstructive footsteps of structural film, Dobai isolates and mechanically reproduces the special effects that create atmosphere in mainstream film. Wind blows selectively across a highly constructed park landscape and against logic, agitates a tree, then a bush and finally the surface of a lake.

Ben Rivers, The Coming Race, 2006, 5 min, UK
An indistinct, slow-moving sea of humanity clambers valiantly up a rocky mountain. This enigmatic pilgrimage draws a range of interpretations as we witness the eternal struggle of humankind to reach the summit.

Scott Morrison, Ocean Echoes, 2007, 9 min, Australia
Working along the edges of abstraction and representation, Morrison creates a powerful metaphor for both the miracle of plant life and the precariousness of our relationship to the world’s bounty. As we head for global food shortages, this glistening field of ripening crops takes on the ominous character of a frantic warning.

Jo Millett, Surroundings: Trees, 2007, 3 min, UK
Trees is just that – a dense canopy of foliage moving imperceptibly in a light breeze. How do these deciduous trees survive so tightly packed? As they turn through their seasonal displays, it becomes difficult to decide whether they are directly observed or digitally simulated.

Sandra Landolt, Push, 2007, 4:30 min extract, Australia
In the unforgiving outback country around Broken Hill, New South Wales a group of volunteers re-assemble a light aircraft from discarded fragments. Their Sisyphean efforts to re-launch the aircraft hint at the absurdity of human ambitions for mastery of the environment.

Dalziel + Scullion, Another Place, 2000, 4 min extract, UK
Residents of the Aberdeenshire village of St Combs pose in front of the coastal landscape they inhabit. Their steady gaze projects a sense of history and belonging, and challenges viewers to declare their own provenance. But how many of us can unequivocally answer the stock question “…and where do you come from?”

Dryden Goodwin, Flight, 2005, 5 min, UK
An enigmatic flight from the city, through the suburbs, along motorways, via forests to the sea is periodically interrupted by the artist drawing across the image in a febrile, cross-hatching of tangled thought.

Tony Hill, Downside Up, 1985, 7:24 min extract, UK
The beauty of the English countryside is experienced as a vertiginous journey through 360°, the camera arcing slowly above fields, touching summer skies and descending underground only to re-emerge in another idyllic rural setting.

Hugh Watt, Blacklaw, 2007, 5 min, UK
The cool, metallic arms of wind generators rhythmically slice through an open landscape shrouded in darkness. We sense the hope invested in this monumental technology, designed to unite the man-made and the magnanimous forces of nature. But the question remains: will it be enough?

Jeff Doring, Mandu, 1983-2008, 10 min extract, Australia
Paddy Nyawarra, Kimberley lawman and Aboriginal activist demonstrates traditional sausage-making techniques in the outback. He passes the knowledge on to the next generation and in so doing, establishes the precedent of Aboriginal land use with its links to Indigenous law – an important feature in native land title claims.

Steven Ball, The Ground, the Sky and the Island, 2008, 7:45 min, UK
Image, sound and text gathered from journeys across Australia are reworked as an essay that becomes a discourse on being and landscape. The work addresses the problem of attempting to produce landscapes and the uncertainty of representation.

Ann Donnelly, Political Landscape, 2007, 7 min extract, UK
The conflicted landscape of Northern Ireland is revealed through the moving history of a family whose vicissitudes intersect with wider historical and political events. Boundaries reveal dispossession as much as land management and the artist asks: “What is native; what is original?”

Destiny Deacon, Over d-fence, 2004, 7 min, Australia
A satirical reworking of the Neighbours format finds Indigenous families recreating outback social networks in the urban landscape, but racial taunts and demonstrations of un-neighbourliness suggest that the legacy of colonisation is ever-present.

George Barber, River Sky, 2002, 6 min, UK
On a trip down the river Thames, a succession of young people hang upside down in front of the camera and reflect on their lives. The incongruity of the upturned figure-ground relationship suggests the need to see things differently. It is the journey through the landscape that will reveal new truths.

Merilyn Fairskye, Connected, 2003, 10 min, Australia
Through a series of interviews and aerial views of the land, Connected reveals the uneasy relationship of the inhabitants of Alice Springs to Pine Gap, a US-Australian Joint Defence Space Research facility sited 17 miles out of town.

Catherine Elwes, Pam's War, 2008, 5 min, UK
A mother’s memories of both bravery and self-interest during World War 2 are re-inscribed into a Cornish coastal landscape while contemporary surfers catch the waves oblivious to the significance of the place for the autochthonous speaker.

Allan Giddy, You, 2005, 4 min extract, Australia
The horizon line and vanishing point of an endless road leap and shimmer in the heat haze of a highway somewhere in New South Wales. The sinister travail of carrion crows play out against a CB radio conversation between two truckers, one British and the other Australian.

John Gillies, Divide, 2005, 10 min extract, Australia
As white settlers drive their flocks of sheep across Australia, biblical quotations heralding the Promised Land provide the ironic justification for the appropriation of land. Vexed questions of nationhood, identity and land ownership circulate and disturb this profoundly lyrical work.

John Hughes & Peter Kennedy, On Sacred Land, 1983, 6 min extract, Australia
In the early 1980s, the issue of land rights was at the sharp political end of Australian Indigenous activism; this work was made in a period when non-Indigenous artists felt there was legitimacy in drawing on Indigenous imagery for the artistic expression of ideas arising from Indigenous issues.

Esther Johnson, Hinterland, 2002, 10 min version, UK
Coastal erosion is the theme of this powerful documentary work in which the voices of Holderness residents describe their lives clinging to the edge of a rapidly crumbling cliff edge. ‘Home’ no longer offers a safe retreat as they enjoy the last months of a sea view with sanguine resignation.

Andrew Kötting, Jaunt, 1995, 6 min, UK
Jaunt wickedly undercuts the seriousness of the ethnographic film and pokes fun at how we garner a sense of place, whether as academic theorists or skippers livening up their commentary for the benefit of tourists on a boat trip up the River Thames.

Matthew Murdoch, Being There, 2006, 2 min, UK
Murdoch, father and son discuss a rugby match between England and Scotland that they plan to attend. They stop off at Hadrian’s Wall to contemplate the historic embodiment of the north south divide while generational and national divisions haunt their conversation.

Lyndal Jones, Noel, 2008, 2 min, Australia
Two old friends reminisce outside a country house imported from Europe to Australia during the gold rush. For a moment, the landscape is inscribed and animated by the old men’s memories soon to be lost to forgetfulness, the march of time and new iterations of human activity.

Margaret Tait, Portrait of Ga, 1952, 4 min, UK
A touching portrait of Tait’s mother is set in her native Orkney Islands where life was hard but never lacking in poetry and individual creativity. Tait’s impressionistic visual style profoundly influenced subsequent generations of experimental filmmakers in the UK.

Warwick Thornton & Darren Dale, Country Song, 2007, 2 min, Australia
An Aboriginal elder sits by a fire musing on the old way of communicating with smoke signals and by singing across the country to his neighbours. Nowadays, with the white fella’s mobile invention, you can speak to another person ‘just like that’, instantaneously. ‘Smart’, he concludes.