writing – Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews

In The Landscape

Meiklejohn Gallery, Lewes

5 September to 24 October, 2026

This essay began as a short statement for my exhibition, In The Landscape, at the Meiklejohn Gallery in Lewes. Given some free time whilst waiting for the opening event, I sat at the computer and started the text. This is certainly not a review, but something of a objective/subjective rumination on my painting practice that references landscape subject matter – but with the added benefit of having co-curated the selection of works with the expert lead taken by Claire Meiklejohn. I shall add and amend the content over the course of the exhibition, including the photographs. (Note: Currently this is the fourth version.)

In the landscape we often walk, jog or cycle, pass through on the train, the bus or in a car. When in drawing mode (it all starts from drawing, as my art education from school to college to university has instilled in me) the connection to the physical environment becomes closer. For the past few years an interest in psychogeography has encouraged me to walk and draw at the same time.

Inevitably one will stop to more fully capture something, more often close up than far away; a leaf, the interesting contortions of a tree branch or the potential focal point of a post, or an architectural feature such as the pointed top of a roof. For a while the drawing is also considered, though I prefer not to make too quick a judgement. Looking at the drawing would take me into a more academic, measured category of recording and I would no longer be observing the subject matter in the intended way. I deem to keep the seeing in the unfolding moment, never really still and only measured by footsteps rather than the pencil and one closed eye.

Most often the walks are made alone, but drawing whilst walking with friends is not uncommon. They walk and talk as I generally get left behind as I stop and start. If an interesting comment is made I might scribble the words onto the back of the sketchbook page (e.g. a small oval series of paintings from walking the Egrets Way has the sub-title, “at the moment”). More commonly I write anything down that comes into my head, oblique or descriptive, so long as it feels connected to the experience of moving through the environment at that time.

The sketchbooks, often the concertina type, inevitably fill up in one walk to take back to the studio. Here, some books might be put aside; others are ever present and regularly flicked through. A few generate paintings. Some of the books are further drawn into and/or painted. Often a sketchbook will be laid out across the studio floor, from corner to corner. As one page literally morphs to the next, the notion of the book of many pages becomes a larger elongated piece in itself.

Note: A larger space than the Meiklejohn Gallery would ideally be necessary to display these books and some readers may have seen a selection of these books exhibited at the Phoenix Project Space in 2025 in collaboration with composer/musician, Tobias Wheal.)

But ultimately the paintings are the main outcome – and a selection from the past five years comes together for In The Landscape. The final studio practice that provides the time, space, activity and concentration to make acrylic or oil paintings takes on a status at least equal to any form of preparation in the form of drawing, writing or visual recollection. This might explain why some paintings bare little pictorial resemblance to a particular landscape location. Every step of the way is the means to the end. But I would hope that this end is not a termination, but rather a visual ground that most often invites a submersion, wherein conventional perspectival visual language plays no great part. There is also a significant compulsion to improvise with the paint medium and its inherent qualities of colour, texture and physical substance, orchestrated by not only compositional outcomes but also an aesthetic sense of completeness. By aesthetic I do not mean some kind of universal standard, as I am not so sure that there is one. It’s a loaded term, for sure. In this painting practice, literally ending in the studio, I strive for a sense of completeness. Embodied in the act of panting – after being similarly embodied in the experience of making drawings in the landscape. An embodied aesthetic? Working towards the final brushstroke that is a full stop, in effect. I have tried this without the back up or prompting of the drawings too, but (I assume due to my training) it only feels valid and informed by some degree of visual context.

As a pointer to any conceptual background I envisage the whole landscape as the Hortus Conclusus of the natural world that can enable the artist to paint freely. To reach some understanding of this rather generalised position I choose, for now, to make paintings rather than overtly intellectualise. Developing imagery in the studio from walking and drawing directly in the landscape allows a certain degree of improvisation and engagement with the qualities of colour relationships, heavy and light painterly surfaces and compositional invention. This working methodology enhances my feelings both about the landscape as subject and painting as process, wherein permission is given to invent and improvise as necessary – but with a certain degree of disciplined decision making.

With an interest in visual aspects of psychogeography (where responses are physical and visual, in addition to generating purely intellectual reactions) I have explored both the broad, panoramic view and the more immersive close-up of small, often unnoticed spaces. These latter, often ignored or inaccessible without effort, areas are of especial interest. The view that might be missed as one heads for the glorious scenery that anything from a holiday snapshot to the Romantic landscape imagery from art history, to the commercial landscape image of many successful contemporary artists often captures, intrigues me. Some aspects of cultural notions of the landscape as being a space to pass through on tour, or to visit as a special treat are fine, but there is also a universe at our feet and before our eyes wherever we may be going. I am aware that this generalises something that might be more accurately explained by the personal unconscious urges that prompt and provoke this predilection. I must have unconsciously sensed this as a young art student cycling out to the countryside around Shrewsbury with watercolours and a sketchbook. The urge remains to set off into the Sussex countryside, or into a particularly special garden in Wales. Perhaps, ultimately, it is all one space and so I shall continue to explore this territory as my lifetime’s project.

LINKS

Meiklejohn Gallery

https://www.geoffhands.co.uk

DANA AWARTANI: Standing by the Ruins

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Towner, Eastbourne

29 November 2025 to 25 January 2026

Dana Awartani – *Standing by the Ruins III*

Visual art is never totally a form of escapism, even if a gallery visit takes us out of our ordinary, everyday for a while. In the UK we inherit a long-standing interest in the represented landscape and the people and places therein. Stepping into the temporary exhibition space on the ground floor of the Towner the visitor, like me, who essentially was there to see the J.M.W. Turner watercolours on display in Impressions in Watercolour, might already have felt more than satisfied with their visit having viewed a multitude of landscapes either aesthetically breathtaking or superbly sublime.

But an organisation such as the Towner pursues a positive remit to celebrate both the past and the present for a broad range of visitors. Thus, the Towner Emerging Artist Fund has supported a slightly reduced version of Dana Awartani’s exhibition, Standing by the Ruins, originally shown at the Arnolfini in Bristol earlier this year. Awartani, a Palestinian-Saudi artist now based in New York, references the craft, history and traditions of the Middle East in her broad ranging practice and applies her universal themes to the present day. This is a highly thought provoking exhibition – and I cannot see Awartani being designated as emerging for too long. She has also been chosen to show her work in the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia in the Venice Biennale in 2026 and if you Google her name there’s much to read on-line already and this makes it unnecessary for me to echo what other writers have already written about this work.

I do not really know what others will have thought of the Towner display, particularly as I was there on the opening night before I have had an opportunity to talk to friends who have seen it for themselves. Not all exhibitions linger in the mind for too long either – but I suspect that this one will. At least it should do, even if for lamentable and distressing reasons. Sadly, but necessarily, we are aware to some degree of the religiously and politically inspired cultural and economic destruction that is going on in the wider world right now. We may well be shouting at our TV screens most nights, but I doubt we regret the choice available to switch off both literally and mentally before retiring for the evening. There might be a sense of the elsewhere that protects us emotionally. Meanwhile we can have a good old gripe about the potholes the local Council fails to fix, the frequently poor performance of our various water companies, or that yet another public library is closing due to lack of funds. If we do still manage to follow the TV news without depression and/or anger setting in too overwhelmingly (choose your own issues to be frustrated by) we can always counter this by getting out and securing an aesthetic fix from visiting an art gallery. Oddly, though positively, in Standing by the Ruins both positive and negative emotions can organically combine.

Dans Awartani – *Standing by the Ruins III*

In Awartani’s work that element of visual delight, dexterity and excellence is certainly foremost, particularly in an applied design sense. The drawings and paintings for her Standing by the Ruins series in 2D and 3D outcomes, reveals an impressive level of skill in applying a traditional, age-old geometric system of drawing and pattern making employing a compass and ruler (not a digital program) into architectural references. Something that looks good draws us in. Form and content interweave.

But before being drawn to the works displayed on the walls the works that the visitor will probably notice first are three floor-based arrangements of coloured bricks that the designs on the wall back up. These are the ruins that the exhibition title references – recreated sections of the floor of the Hammam al-Samara in Gaza, one of the oldest bathhouses in the region, but which has now probably been destroyed. To enhance the notion of destruction and obliteration the bricks are cracked and well on the way to further decimation. The artist worked with a collective of adobe brick makers (craftspeople of Syrian, Afghan and Pakistani origin) and deliberately left out the binding agent (hay) so the works are purposely intended to break up.

Whilst these would-be floors are adequately placed for the visitor to walk around there is a slight sense of the possibility of tripping, though no one does. The works are clearly installed rather than functioning as sculptures. Quite soon college tutor mode kicks in for me and, if I was questioning the young maker in an end of project tutorial, I may have commented that I want to see people walk on these floor coverings. Get on trend – employ the audience as active participants. In fact, I imagine being one of them myself. I visualise seeing the piece(s) destroyed, not because I dislike the work, but because the volume of the heavily implied message might, metaphorically, be turned up. If we accept that somewhere down the line we, and the governments we elect, are all complicit to some degree in the endless tragedies of the world, we are, by implication, the destroyers too, so lets be more physically involved here. Thereafter, more bricks could be made to replace the sculpture anyway, for a never-ending sequence of works to be installed elsewhere. But this is a male response. And that’s the problem.

To reflect on this initial reaction, a quick summarising that has its routes in a previous modus operandi in fine art education, I was possibly thrown by that term emerging. I had too soon adopted an attitude that wanted to question and to advise this young artist. Arrogance, I know, but bear with me. My imaginary student might next have advised me to consider a set of other works displayed on the wall. These are from the Let me mend your broken bones series. In these works she has employed others to participate. Not in destroying but in making and mending by darning on medicinally dyed silk and implying a more positive attitude to life of preserving rather than wrecking. A female response – albeit embodied in hard reality.

Dana Awartani – *Let me Mend Your Broken Bones*

Initially the colour range might draw the observer to them, with attractive dyes of orange, red yellow and green. But get up close and we see a previously, a purposely, distressed surface that is fixed but permanently scarred. Paired paper panels display a text that records the scene’s recent history. The where, when, by whom, incident type and cause – listed methodically. Cold black text on a white background. Record keeping. Factual. Cultural cleansing is a term that terrifies and is certainly not confined to the Middle East. The interests, cultural background and broader context of an individual – such as an artist or any of the visitors to this exhibition – are always part of a much larger whole. This, of course, is stating the obvious. What may not always be so apparent or impactful is the fact that what might initially be considered as happening elsewhere, instigated by others, relates to our own history too. In a postcolonial age we now might think it’s in the past. Seeing this exhibition and letting it sink in for days after is sobering.

Dana Awartani – *Let me Mend Your Broken Bones* (text)

Standing by the Ruins is how Awartani operates. It constitutes an active positioning. Her work responds a little more quietly and contemplatively than a reactive, impulsive temperament might. The work acknowledges creation as a response to death and ruination; counters destruction with gentleness, positive even if piecemeal, literally re-making and mending. A slow and time-consuming process that is appropriate, for lives and lands are precious, and the relationship between each other and others can be far more accommodating of perceived differences. Hence the importance of landscape related themes in art from any era and of what is, and was, witnessed in various locations. So, if I might cheekily paraphrase a short statement from an essay in the catalogue* from the Impressions in Watercolour exhibition by Ian Warrell: “Turner had… contributed substantially to the transformation of perceptions of landscape subject matter…”

Dana Awartani changes our perception and understanding too.

Geoff Hands, Brighton (December 2025)

* Essay: Nature raw or cooked: Approaches to Sketching in British Landscape Watercolours by Ian Warrell, published in Impressions In Watercolour: Turner and his Contemporaries. (Holburne Museum, Bath, 2025)

Links:

Goodwood Art Foundation

Verbier Art Summit (Youtube)

The elephant in the room?

Forms of postcolonial destruction continues today, aided and abetted by super powers to the east and west – even here in Brighton where L3Harris (the sixth largest defence contractor in the USA – and the world’s largest manufacturer of precision weapons) produces parts for the F-35 fighter jets used by the Israeli government to help destroy Gaza and the Palestinians living there.

Campaign Against Arms Trade

BREAKING LINES

Futurism and the Origins of Experimental Poetry / Dom Sylvester Houédard and Concrete Poetry in Post-war Britain

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art
15 January to 11 May 2025

These two exhibitions, historically related but decades apart, make for a fascinating visual experience at the Estorick Collection. Housed in the two rooms reserved for temporary exhibitions, usefully on the same floor, there is a palpable excitement about the graphical form of text and the (early) expanded field form of print that links poetry to the visual arts. The display as a whole has the feel of a contemporary installation work with texts enlarged to cover significant expanses of wall. Framed text works dominate, as one might expect, but video screens enable the page turning of books that are otherwise displayed in glass cabinets.

On the walls in both spaces there is much to read and/or to observe purely visually. Usefully, the expository texts are reproduced in the newspaper-type catalogue that further expands the exhibition to wherever the visitor might take it. In fact to miss the catalogue, designed by Studio Bergini, the visitor would be missing part of the exhibition.

Along with the other visitors at the Press preview I turned right into the Futurism and the Origins of Experimental Poetry display. Carlo Carrà’s ‘Atmospheric Swirls – A Bursting Shell’ (1914) from the Estorick Collection, stands out immediately. TUMB, ZANG, TUUUM, ZANG and EEE, onomatopoeia – sound words – are integrated with painterly applied ink, charcoal and collage on paper. In these present times (well, maybe all times) such as aesthetic celebration of the sounds of missiles seems somewhat absurd and in poor taste. But the potential elephant in the room, the Italian Futurist links with Fascism (in particular the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who founded Futurism), was not ignored as the wall texts and the catalogue acknowledge this disturbing context.

Carlo Carra – *‘Atmospheric Swirls – A Burning Shell’*, 1914 Courtesy Estorick Collection

Christopher Adams and other members of the Estorick’s curatorial team have, in effect, stood back to allow the visitor to make what they will of this discomforting aspect in the exhibition. But they have not downplayed the sheer visual exuberance of how poets and visual artists freed the conventions of text display in publications such as ‘L’Italia Futurista’ (published from 1916 to 1918) through to Carlo Belloli’s ‘Texts-Poems for Walls’ (1944) that predicted the very public space of walls (and now the digital screen) as the common space for readers/viewers to be impacted and affected by the word. The show also includes rare original editions of works including Fortunato Depero’s famous book, ‘Depero futurista’ (1927) which is now more commonly known as the ‘Bolted Book’ with two aluminium bolts binding the pages together.

Transferring to the second display, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Concrete Poetry in Post-war Britain celebrates the work of Dom Sylvester Houédard (aka dsh), a Benedictine monk who is a contender for godfather of Concrete Poetry up to the present day. As the visitor would expect, dsh’s work is well represented here with works loaned from the Lisson Gallery. There is also material from Edition Hansjorg Mayer via the Chelsea College of the Arts Library (UAL) including Carlo Belloli’s ‘sole solo’ (futura14, 1966).

As with any exhibition holding works in cabinets you just want to get in there, although all six concrete poems from the Brighton Festival of 1967 are laid out for all to see. There are also works by several other British exponents of concrete poetry, including Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Furnival and Bob Cobbing. A signed copy of Cobbing’s ‘chamber music’ (futura19, 1967) adds a human dimension to the strongly graphical ingredients of the show. I mention this as a bombardment of the graphical might get wearisome if your main interest is in painting – the Estorick is full of paintings, of course.

I was also wondering whom the audience might include over the next few months. In addition to the loyal Estorick crowd I would hope that poets, graphic designers and art and design students from all disciplines, new cohorts perhaps, will see the show. For the fine artist with an involvement with text and collage the exhibition will not disappoint either. If anyone is unsure, just go along and support this organisation. The bookshop is full of goodies too – including that highly collectable catalogue.

Oh, and get that old typewriter out of the attic.

LINKS:

Estorick Collection

Catalogue design by Studio Bergini

Lisson Gallery

Edition Hansjorg Meyer

Jonathan Jones in the Guardian

Vintage typewriters at George Blackman