Anya Gallaccio's installation at Tate Britain landscape art is reviewed by Simon Schama in the Guardian.
Here is an excerpt, "Landscape art was born out of the tension between the universal and the local. Its first masters - Joachim Patinir and Pieter Bruegel the Elder - limned the earth as if born aloft on angels' wings, offering to man a glimpse of the godly view."
This rundown on the history of landscape art includes the ideas of landscape art as possession, the gaze from the courtly window, the Romantic gaze from the bohemian country house, and the liberation of natural space from both frame and fence of the latter half of the 20th century.
The review praises Anya Gallaccio's intelligent and unpredictable installations. One is a glade of 200-year-old oak trunks. Oak was the wood that built the powerful imperial navy of the 18th century and helped Britain accumulate wealth, even the wealth that built the gallery housing Gallaccio's art. As nature reclaims it territory in this gallery, Schama concludes, "the seven trees stand as a solemn grove of memory."
About Me
- Christina
- I revere the stuff of nature -- both the detritus and the wonders. While transforming earth, fibers and branches into mysterious vessels and sensual objects, I seek to relay messages heard only by the ear of the heart. Forces and forms of nature act as metaphors for the barest bones of the human condition. I borrow building techniques from past cultures and the natural building movement. These include: structures from Native American architecture and Japanese fence building, natural clay plasters, and straw-clay building.