The Lie of the Land

There's more than meets the eye in this exhibition of works comprising drawing, painting and collage.

Alejandro Pintado, Ambrosine Allen and Jane Ward work from past representations of landscape such as 18th & 19th century engravings and model village kitsch, each producing 'mindscapes', which bespeak an underlying Magic Realist bent.

Pintado focuses on the quintessentially English landscapes of Constable and Capability Brown. He starts by forming large, hazy charcoal landscapes on linen, which are interrupted by various configurations of diagrammatic markings with hints of day-glo colour. His approach appears to disassemble and remap the picture plane. At times, the image is peeled back revealing a conceptual scaffolding that alludes to the artificiality of portraying the natural.

Ambrosine Allen's view of the land is phantasmagorical. The eye roves restlessly across its impossible topographical undulations. Laboriously constructed by hand, using tiny collaged elements, her monochrome, antique worlds invite close scrutiny, impelling the viewer to attempt to decipher the space therein.

The digital collages of Jane Ward are concerned with global flux. Her fragmented, dreamlike panoramas play, godlike, with scale. She contrasts snippets of an idealised model village (including miniscule human figures deep within the image) with huge tracts of the 'real' world.

But do these imaginative landscapes allow us an 'escape'? Do they allow us to rest, to 'lie' in the peace of the land, the wholeness of the image? Each artist dissects, analyses and plays with the image and idea of land replicating the way land itself has been enclosed and objectified, delicately broaching the subject of our own uncertain ecology.