FURZE

Nearly every corner of Britain has been cultivated, controlled and created, wilderness tamed and crafted into landscape. In 1604 this word slipped across the channel, from the Dutch landschap, to worm its way into our consciousness. Landscape has become so ubiquitous with the British shape of space as to feel almost essential: how we consume the horizon around us, and how human-made decisions – gardens, fields, farming, more – interact with a natural sublime.

Jackson Whitefield’s work exists alongside a tradition of British artists in the landscape, turning it inside out, querying it, poking and prodding it, asking for it to release its essence. The works in FURZE emerge from a field of Cornish gorse being burned, as part of its lifecycle as a plant that thrives on being burnt back to emerge again. The works from FURZE use the accidental interaction of charred vegetation on paper and canvas to allow landscape to write itself, etching its lines onto the sheet, engaging in a dialogue with its own essence. There is a delicacy to this art, the incidental becoming involved, emerging in the sun and wind.

An initial gesture becomes an entropic space where gesture, image, product and artwork are all collapsed into one plane. The ‘light-writing’ of photography is in dialogue with the literal surface-writing of FURZE. Later, the granular rasterization and physicality of the risograph machine and the silkscreen, two of Whitefield’s preferred reproduction methods, physically transforms the images held within in their reproduction and circulation. These works also defy categorisation: between sculpture, photography, performance and publication, with Whitefield the documentation of the act is also part of the act, the self-printed-and-published booklets that pollinate his practice are part of the act, and this exhibition is also part of the act. The works of FURZE are physically drawn from the landscape, asking questions of our involvement and stewardship in this push-and-pull system of humans in nature, and the Sisyphean task of extracting meaning from the space surrounding us.

- Lewis Chaplin