- Venue
- New County Hall
- Location
The space used by Sovay Berriman, Jackie Knight and Patrick Lowry at the New County Hall in Truro is a sort of thoroughfare and some of the pieces seem to be architectural or decorative features in disguise. For example, Jackie Knight’s transparent landscapes set half an inch away from the wall and starkly lit from above are not to be confused with the many commemorative plaques in the space. Etched with a laser onto perspex they use the bare contours of coastal scenes (Godrevy, 2006 and Perran Sands, 2006) to depict landscape as a series of computer generated lines. In Godrevy an empty plot at a tourist campsite casts a rhomboid shadow on the white wall behind, as ephemeral as the mental image of Cornish landscape that flickers in the mind of so many visitors to the region.
To create the screen prints (Bassets Cove, 2006 and Chapel Porth, 2006) Knight has used 3D wireframe software to interpret information from scanned photographs. Appearing as a topographical grid they reveal the landscape morphology, but the density of tone, and therefore the actual land characteristics are only obvious from a distance. Both techniques survey landscapes that may be deeply familiar to the artist with a detached, even neutral gaze. They are either a mental shadow or an evolving feature of a vaster geological continuum.
At first glance Sovay Berriman’s Scheme (2006) could be a table-top scale model of the council building, yet it is a charming escapist fantasy at the heart of the institution. In the spirit of Jim Lambie, Berriman has used cheap, low-tech household materials to create a landscape on the top of a dented metal desk. Washing powder Alpine peaks are fringed with plastic yellow Rawlplug trees. Kneeling down to take a child’s eye view of the desk top I see how the deliberately careful arrangement of Rawlplugs embodies control, yet the vulnerability of the flimsy materials and the precariously balanced powder also suggests imminent collapse.
In a similar way, Pass (2006) mixes a playful childlike façade with illusions of grandeur. Fifteen white boards are cut into whipped-cream peaks at head height and are arranged in an overlapping formation, so that the “pass” is a zigzagging path between them. Blue glitter streaks on the boards give it a touch of fairground pizzazz, but moving back again through the formation you see untreated plywood behind, a reminder that this game requires an imaginative leap from the viewer.
Patrick Lowry’s Blue Lift (2006) appears to be a metal framework with a pulley system that seems to both support the building’s walkway above it and sink into the ground beneath. The structure, painted a 1980s municipal blue, is actually made of wood. This redundant “machinery” may point to the many disused tin mine sites in Cornwall which form part of the heritage trail, now silent, enigmatic features in the landscape.
Each of the artists have attempted to reimagine landscape, both as it is incarnated in the realms of memory and fantasy and how it is hinted at through symbolic reference. Within us a sense of place undergoes metamorphosis. It is warped, muted or amplified selectively, according to our will.
painter living in Cornwall.
