Eclipse

Installation of sixty woodland and roadside plants captured in silhouette during the cycle of one year

Artist’s book and identification guide with text by Jenny Uglow published by Stour Valley Arts

 Exhibition runs 22nd June to 8th September 2013

The Beaney House of Art & Knowledge
18 High Street, Canterbury

Edward Chell’s installation of sixty plant silhouettes presents a virtual roadside verge or woodland floor displayed alongside the eclectic collections of The Beaney. These delicately rendered portraits of a myriad of species, from nettle and bluebell to buttercup and gorse, hover between layers of lacquer as though preserved in a toxic environment for perpetuity.

Chell’s celebration of common plant forms has a bitter sweet, elegiac quality. Whilst these paintings capture a sense of joyous encounter with the natural world, the outline images suggest an absence and are redolent of the 18^th C silhouette portraits kept as mementoes of loved ones.

Presented in a museum context, Eclipse highlights the tensions between the rational, scientific impulse to record and classify the natural world according to Linnaean systems, and the fragile, fugitive, ever-shifting eco systems on which our existence depends.

These paintings are reproduced in a 108p artist’s book and identification guide, with an essay by Jenny Uglow and an interview with the artist (£14). http://stourvalleyarts.org.uk/

Eclipse falls within Chell’s extended project Soft Estate, an investigation of motorway landscapes and the 18^th Century Picturesque.  Soft Estate will be shown at Bluecoat, Liverpool later this year with an accompanying publication.

Edward Chell is represented by Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf. He is currently an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow. Recent projects include a publication, In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway co-edited with Dr Andrew Taylor (2012),  solo exhibitions Viewing Stations at Tank, London (2011), Gran Tourismo at Little Chef Ings, supported by Grizedale Arts (2011).

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