Newcastle University MFA Summer Exhibition 2015 - Nigel Morgan - Hiraeth

"In Welsh the word hiraeth offers a way into understanding our yearning for the elusive something that nature and landscape means to us; analogous to an unattainable longing for a place, or perhaps a person, the language of landscape becomes metaphoric to an emotional language of the soul. The language of landscape is a language of loss, of distance, of longing, and the more we try to define it the less clear it becomes."

"Landscape is made and it is the mediator by which nature has been perceived as something other. This continues to be a cultural problem:the measurement and technological representation of landscape reinforces an anxiety over our distancing from nature; however now, in the Anthropocene, everything is landscape and landscape can re-connect us to nature, it is a real material connection."

"This work is an attempt to understand this longing, through the use of nature, the matter of landscape."

Being Landscape: The Landscape is a creation of and by ourselves and our imagination. It is ‘the peculiar moment of being present to perception [the] ‘matter of experience’… the materiality of what is otherwise an ephemeral and contingent snatch of lived experience.’ J. J. Marshall, p202, Landscape Theory. 2008.

Newcastle University MFA Summer Exhibition 2015 - Sarah Dunn

Sarah Dunn is an artist whose practice focuses very clearly upon the observation and consideration of her immediate cultural and natural landscape. Through a process of careful documentation and patient archiving a catalogue of elements is built, within this, its many indexes may now evolve and shift. This ‘catalogue’ may be regarded as an accumulation of stimuli, one in which objects transmute sensibilities; buildings become new habitats, patterns become language and books become birds.

The work uses drawing and writing to begin, it is sculptural, sensitive to changes, personal, social, political, but firmly rooted in the traditions of form, craft and observational relationships.

In Between Fear and Mother Love is an entry into the index of observation. It uses the three totemic birds, the Bittern, the Woodcock and the Nightjar as symbolic chapter headings into which the objects, textiles and elements within the work are placed. These objects carry more than the sum of their parts. However, The canny observer will also find memories, emotions and experiences. The library of these birds is an echo chamber, a place of responses.