Last week I was fortunate to have some time with a dear friend and she kindly accompanied me to a new exhibition in Exeter at the RAMM museum. The title of the show had attracted me: Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape and the website explains that it is:
"a major new contemporary art exhibition exploring Dartmoor’s evocative landscape through photography, film and Land Art. Showing artwork from 1969 to 2024, this exhibition demonstrates Dartmoor’s attraction to artists who, through photography, explore current issues including the interconnected ecological and climate crises and access rights."
There were so many delights, with work from familiar photographers as well as ones new to me. The exhibition ranged from the conceptual Land Art from the 1960s and 70s by artists Nancy Holt, Richard Long and Marie Yates to Tanao Sasraku's innovative earth-pigment collages.
I could enthuse about all of the works but I have chosen four artists to focus on, Susan Derges, Jo Bradbury, Garry Fabian Miller and Alex Hartley, to give you a flavour of what is on offer in this exhibition.
Three of Susan Derges' huge images were stunningly displayed together for the first time. I had heard Susan talk about her work before, but until I was stood beside these works I hadn't appreciated the difficulty of what she was doing. Mel Gooding describes this in Elemental:
"Light sensitive photographic paper is taken at night to a point on the river, or the seashore near the river’s mouth. There it is submerged in the water, and exposed. A flash directed from above the water’s surface is enough to register on the paper what is for that fraction of a second caught between light source and paper: the river’s eddy, flow and turbulence, the edge of the incoming wave as it flows in, the drag of sand behind it.................The counter-current turbulence in the Devon river configures like the whorl of the spiral nebula; in the apparent chaos of diverse events and constant motion we sense order. Where the scientist seeks to bring into practical understanding what technologies of observation have discovered, the artist has a different purpose; to create and nurture a sense of wonder at the phenomenal world, and to intensify our imaginative experience of it. These photograms of river and shoreline waters and the sky seen through them are at once revelations of a particular and unrepeatable moment in nature, and images that invite our recognition of resemblance and analogy."
RAMM have now acquired Eden 6 for their collection.
The second choice is Garry Fabian Miller, whose work intrigued me for several reasons. This image "explores how the colour cycle of a leaf can stand in place of photo negatives to create pictures about the photosynthesis of trees. For this work he gathered beech leaves from the wood in his garden over 24 days in May 2004." The creation of a set, the telling of a story in such a focused way:
The captions explain that that the photographic materials Fabian Miller had used since the mid-1970s were reaching the end of their production cycle, and he began creating luminograms every day for a year, by shining light through coloured glass, liquids, and cut paper forms on to direct positive colour paper in the darkroom with long exposures lasting anywhere between one and 20 hours. This photo is from another exhibition but gives you a sense of the work:
What struck me was back in 2004, Gary was saying "my dominant thought was how can I come to terms with the fact that we are all going to destroy ourselves, how to deal with this enormity?" And the reality we are facing now is even more stark. It was heartening to see photographers in the exhibition capturing images of the young people living off-grid or protesting to protect their right to roam, showing that they are taking up the baton for the future of the moor.
The third choice is Jo Bradbury,, another Devon-based photographer. I have taken one of her online courses on Smartphone photography in the past and it was lovely to see her work included in the exhibition. Two things struck me about her display - one was the originality of showing the images in a panel sticking out from the wall, with a light behind them. You felt like you were standing in the wood, enjoying the light playing on the leaves.
The other aspect was that Jo looks for ways to make her photography more sustainable and these images were dipped in beeswax rather than using glass to protect them! The notes say that she describes her practice as aiming to make "something that's more about being connected to the moments and the sense of place where I exist". You can marvel at the variety of her work to date on her website.
And each of us can do what we can to make our lives more sustainable, to ease our footprint on the Earth, while also lobbying those in power to fight for the changes that are needed.
The final artist that I have chosen is Alex Hartley, whose creation The Summoning Stones was commissioned by the museum for this exhibition and revisits elements of the Land Art of the 1960/70s. It was inspired by a 2000-year-old wooden human figure that had been found in Kingsteignton, Devon and is now on display at the museum.
The work consists of huge images of Dartmoor standing stones displayed on recycled solar panels. Alex writes:
'Neolithic stones have been here for 3000, 4000 years and they're still visible. You can reach back through time and touch the very thing that these people touched. It's so rare to find those places. And there's something very specific about Dartmoor, about how iconic the rocky outcrops are. I can see it when I'm away from here and there’s not many places that I feel that way about, where they really follow me around and they are in me’.
Alex invites you to stand at the centre of this installation, ‘to basically be plugged into the main frame’ saying, ‘I want the energy of these rocks to transfer into the viewer. It's almost certainly unachievable, but I really have that as the goal for it’.
And it certainly did vibrate with energy for me as a stood at the center of the standing circle of images:
You can listen to Alex talking about the work on this podcast from the Stone Club, which covers photography, sculpture, environmental, play, and so much more!
Please watch this video about the exhibition and go if you can! From Richard Long's 'walking as art' to Alex Hartley's Summoning Stones, and the immersive experience of Ashish Ghadiali's film of swimming in a Dartmoor River, and so much in between, you will come away with new ideas and a deeper appreciation of Dartmoor.