Exhibition Review: Scaling the Sublime – Art at the Limits of Landscape at Djanogly Gallery

Neudecker’s piece is, in the first place, a kind of 3D recreation of Casper David Friedrich’s painting from the 1820s, The Sea of Ice, which portrayed a British sailing ship as it was overturned by ice on Rear Admiral Parry’s expedition to find the north west passage through the Arctic. In Neudecker’s art work a large detailed model of the ship, with all its intricate rigging, sits upright in a hole in a raised stage which represents the sea of ice which held Parry’s expedition in its frozen grip for ten long, very cold months. Exploration, desolation and, more than anything else, the smallness of human effort against the massive and often terrifying forces of nature – the sublime; all these are reflected by Friedrich’s painting, and Neudecker’s modern take on it, which includes digital screens showing the artist’s recent footage of moving Greenland ice floes.

Readers of Romantic literature might also be reminded of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, which ends with the pursuit of the monster across desolate frozen wastes. But while the seven artists at Djanogly tackle the same landscape interests of their forebears of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, most do so with technology that was undreamt of 200 years ago.

Neudecker has her digital screens. Tim Knowles has cameras and a technique by which he creates distorted images of nocturnal walks along the Devon coast; a corner of Britain forever sacred to the Romantics as it was in the West Country that Coleridge and the Wordsworths lived in, and where Coleridge composed Kubla Khan and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Another contemporary artist, Richard T. Walker, based in California, uses film to create a comical variation on the “vastness of nature” theme. Here, in a nine-minute cinematic piece, we see him walking away into an endless desert and then dwarfed by a forested landscape. He stands precariously on the top of a step ladder, carrying an image of a mountain peak, perhaps from a nineteenth-century landscape etching, which fits the profile of the real mountain that towers in the distance.

The second film here is Simon Faithfull’s Going Nowhere, which shows the artist walking the shrinking boundaries of a sandbar as the sea slowly closes over it. A drone was used to record Faithfull’s solitary perambulation, which concludes with him wading through the waves, another human effort reduced to smallness by the unstoppable powers of the natural world.

Not all the artists here use digital tech. Rebecca Partridge, who has curated the exhibition with Nicholas Alfrey, displays thirty wooden oil paintings showing changing views of the sky and clouds as seen for a month above Norway. These are physically small paintings, although of course they capture only momentary glimpses of a very large sky.

If you have time, have a look at the gallery visitor book because it contains a long unsigned comment from a very disenchanted visitor. In summary it says: put down your smart phones, forget about this art and get out in the real world to experience the sublime wonder of the natural world at first hand. The visitor and the artists here, though, might agree on one thing: the world is a very big place, and don’t you forget it.

Scaling the Sublime: Art at the Limits of Landscape is showing at Nottingham Lakeside Arts’ Djanogly Art Gallery until Sunday 17 June 2018.

Nottingham Lakeside Arts website