An Exhibition With Soul
Soulscapes is a major new exhibition taking over the Dulwich Picture Gallery for the coming months that examines and redefines the landscape genre, writes Michael Holland.
When we think of landscape art, people invariably think of Constable, Turner, Gainsborough and our ‘green and pleasant land’; of paintings from long ago peopled by rosy-cheeked farm-folk. Britain is not that country any more but for some the countryside still feels like it is.
Curated by Lisa Anderson, Managing Director of the Black Cultural Archives
and founder of Black British Art, she has put together a collection of works by artists from the African Diaspora who have looked deep into themselves to consider how they experience their own landscape and their place within it.
Soulscapes is themed into: belonging, memory, joy and transformation. The artists took different meanings from the topics. Hurvin Anderson explored his family’s Jamaican homeland and its tropical foliage, while Jermaine Francis placed Black figures into rustic surroundings, their urban, hooded presence creating an uneasy dichotomy for no explicable reason other than we do not see it enough.
Even the Mausoleum, usually cordoned off to the public, hosted Phoebe Boswell’s I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know, a contemplative video depicting life in Zanzibar.
Kimathi Donkor put Black people in lush grass, perhaps atop the White Cliffs of Dover and looking very much at one with nature. A bicycle wheel creeps into the frame of On Episode Seven, evoking images of The Famous Five – who famously never came near an inner-city – on an adventure. The artist says, ‘these works represent hopeful visions that honour what the fulfilment of black liberation might sometimes feel like — even if only fleetingly.’
Several artists let their minds go back to Africa. Kimzthi Mafafo created a tapestry on a fabric used mainly for Nigerian costume; a woman is climbing out of a white cocoon and into the luxuriant colours of the land and its flora.
My favourite piece was Mónica de Miranda’s Sun rise. A simple image of three people standing in the sea’s shallows that elicits so many thoughts of what the artist wants us to see. They stare straight at the viewer daring us to ask them a question. Was this a funeral? A wedding? Maybe a baptism. Is the family broken? Separated? Are they migrants? Refugees? Are they merely making a point of showing that they are strong and fearless and can stand exactly where they want on this earth?
As I walked through the themed rooms alive with colour I caught the occasional glimpse of the other side of the gallery where centuries-old landscapes hung. They paled into a palette of tedium in comparison.
Soulscapes allows the artists to take back the landscape that has evolved as it has done for the last 400 years and change it.
Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21 7Ad until June 2nd. Tues – Sun 10am – 5pm. Admission: £17.50.
Booking: www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
