Back To The Edge

08Apr12

I seem to be returning to subjects a lot at the moment, which is a good thing and one I’ll in turn come back to at some point.

Today it’s the Edgelands, courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Almost a year ago I finished a post by saying :

It’s, (to me), a fascinating subject, the Edgelands, and there seems to be so much interesting stuff written about them. Maybe I’ll come back to you / me on the subject when I’ve investigated further.

So it’s been awhile but back to the subject I’ve come, this time via an exhibition featuring the work of George Shaw and Michael Landy – with Shaw revisiting the “scenes of his childhood on the Tile Hill council estate in the suburbs of Coventry”, and Landy contributing prints portraying weeds “the overlooked and neglected flora of Edgelands”.

Landy’s work was new to me and was interesting albeit as much for the journey to the finished pieces than the pieces themselves, however I was really there for George Shaw’s work which I think is tremendous even when produced without the trademark enamel paints which he’s become synonymous with.

That said whilst I do love Shaw’s work I do find it enormously unsettling too, although perhaps that’s not surprising – “his anxiety at feeling out of place in the landscape of his own past is often potently expressed in locations where the edge of the estate runs into the wilderness or trees blur into the distinction between urban and wild”.

The exhibition runs until Sunday 23rd September and whilst it’s only small it does have the decency to be perfectly well formed and as such I’d highly recommend it to you.