After a successful summer 2017 at Grizedale Forest in Cumbria and then six weeks at the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle, The Long View opens in The North Wall Arts Centre Gallery in Oxford on Saturday May 5 and runs until Saturday May 26.
The Long View introduces visitors to seven Cumbrian trees and the very different landscapes that surround them and the exhibition is an invitation to slow down and pause.
Since November 2015, Rob and Harriet have photographed and written about trees and they have also created temporary art installations at each one, exploring place, journeys, culture and environment. Rob’s photographs and Harriet’s poetry, together with installations and journal entries, offer a considered insight into these remarkable trees in all weathers and all seasons, night and day.
As the culmination of two years with the trees, The Long View encompasses photographs, poems, screen prints and 3D work. The exhibition not only celebrates trees, it also captures the heart of the landscape and the challenges that it is facing, and explores people’s relationship with the environment.
Corridor8’s Dave Pritchard said: “This elegant and open-ended project takes as its starting point a deceptively simple concept: seven lone trees in disparate locations, standing initially for nothing very much and nowhere in particular, but eventually interconnecting with everywhere and everything … (these) seven trees offer a kind of cultural acupuncture: pinpoints of a stimulus that should awaken and invigorate our entire sensibility.”
“Our work is all about being outside and slowing down, taking time to get a sense of the many different layers of landscape,” added Harriet, “and appreciating the value of being in nature. The Long View exhibition and the book that accompanies it focus on seven trees and repeated walking journeys to them. Through these encounters, we then explore how they relate to issues that are relevant to woodlands, to trees and to landscapes across the UK.”
The Long View is at The North Wall Gallery from Saturday May 5 to Saturday May 26, open weekdays from 10am to 4pm and Saturdays from 12 noon to 4pm and free admission. It will then be touring to Brighton in June.
The book of the project, also entitled The Long View, is available from The North Wall Arts Centre or from somewhere-nowhere press, priced at £15 www.somewhere-nowhere.com/shop