PostNatures.

Using JMW Turner’s The Festival of the Opening of the Vintage at Mâcon (1803) as a conceptual point of departure, this exhibition explores the connections that exist between the histories of women’s bodies and natural landscapes as colonised subjects, and questions how they might be reclaimed in a post-natural context.

We live on a planet dominated by humans. Everything on earth has been tinged by human activity, so that the ecological balance of the natural world has ended. We are living in post-natural times, a world in which our prolific and continued use of fossil fuels has altered the earth’s atmosphere, fertilisers and pollutants have changed the nutrient balance of waterways, plastics are clogging up our oceans and bodies, and agriculture is depleting the health of the soils. We have entered an age of mass ecocides, species extinctions and post-natural disasters. How do we view the landscape in this context? Can we continue to perpetuate the tropes of the picturesque without question, and celebrate nature without the niggling call of climate-change anxiety? How do we redefine nature, in the context of the unnatural? The PostNatures exhibition presents historical representations of landscape in the context of an ecological crisis, and from a feminist perspective. 

Albrecht Altdorfer was one of the first artists to take an interest in landscape as an independent subject. His etching, The Large Spruce (c.1520), is exhibited in PostNatures alongside Victoria Lucas’ PostNatureGlitch II (2022), a digitally disrupted image that foregrounds the glitch in a lithograph by JS Templeton. Exhibited together, it is possible to see the lasting influence of Altdorfer’s 16th Century composition. Lucas’ adaptation of Templeton’s image agitates this traditional trope using a digital process of fragmentation, a method that forms a metaphor for the impact that capitalism has wrought upon the natural world. This digital unravelling of the picturesque creates a post-natural fissure, within which new possibilities of being and becoming may manifest. 

In Greenscreen I and Greenscreen II (2018), Lucas draws upon the work of Dutch landscape painters as a process of scrutinising histories; marking the impacts of capitalism on the natural world using collaging techniques. During the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th Century, artists created compositions that superimposed a variety of locations in to the same scene. What is interesting about this process is that it mirrored the changeability of the Dutch artists’ immediate geographic and economic situation, as an intensive and unprecedented land reclamation project unfolded across The Netherlands. In Lucas’ work, this manmade, geographical transformation is explored through visual absences, as elements from two Aelbert Cuyp reproductions are removed and replaced with a 'green screen’. Through this reference to a filmic visual-effects technique, she offers apparatus for further potential reimagining, so that the pastoral, idyllic and the picturesque are disrupted through this adapted method of fictionalising the landscape. In the exhibition, these cut-out absences are playfully echoed in nearby works, such as the hollow of Redon’s tree, and the devastation of Paul Nash’s mine crater. 

JMW Turner’s painting The Festival of the Opening of the Vintage at Mâcon (1803) is, similarly, a fictionalised representation. The river bend that forms the backdrop to this spectacular French vista is in actual fact a view from Richmond Hill in Surrey, UK. This British viewpoint has been visually amalgamated with selected details from a quick sketch of Tournus (situated 30km to the north of Mâcon), which Turner made on a brief visit to the Burgundy Region during the Treaty of Amiens. In the final composition on display in PostNatures, Turner depicts a grape harvest ritual in the foreground. A group of young women dance in celebration in this scene, while a group of seemingly older women empty the gathered crops in to a vat ready for wine-treading. Turner uses a depiction of light to guide the viewer’s eye toward the carefree youths, bare arms raised, dresses billowing around the suggested movement of bodies, the older generations of women looking on as they finish their labour. Although a romanticised and gendered depiction of womanhood (which apparently Turner imagined rather than witnessed), there is something powerful about this matrilineal kinship that perhaps calls for a re-reading of the work. The constructed scenes of Turner, Cuyp and Lucas in the context of this exhibition form a timely reminder that our contemporary landscapes are in flux; materially, culturally, environmentally and conceptually. 

Cultural positions of women have also transformed over time. Patriarchal systems, established from the end of the Middle Ages through to The Enlightenment across Europe and beyond, sought to control women in all areas of society. Denying women’s rights to a wage meant that the majority were fully dependent upon their male relatives for survival. Denying women access to education placed them firmly in the home, for a life of domestic servitude and reproductive labour. Through land enclosures and the horrors of the witch trials, women were separated from the land - from nature - and each other. Combined, these oppressive structures reduced female subjects to their biological sex in a way that denied them power and agency, while reducing their bodies to the category of exploitable ‘nature’. Selected representations of women from pre-history to the present day have been included in PostNatures, creating space for new narratives to unfold through a constellation of meaning. 

There are a series of women working in and with the land on display in this exhibition; cutting rushes, gleaning and staking the fields, bringing in the harvest and selling their wares. There are also a collection of mythical and religious representations of women, drawn from a variety of cultures and epochs. Bringing these forms, apparitions and deities together in one space provides an insightful constellation of meaning, which traces the fluctuating position of women across societies and time periods. For example, two depictions of the Madonna and child, one by Jacopo de' Barbari and the other by Charles Fairfax Murray, are positioned together. De’ Barbari depicts the Virgin Mary breast-feeding her baby in solitude, while resting against a large tree situated in a forest. In Fairfax Murray’s image, which was painted over 300 years later, we see the Madonna holding her child stiffly away from her body, chaperoned by Saint Catherine, watched over by angels and enclosed in a small, highly managed rose garden. In this comparison, her diminished freedom becomes entangled with the shifting cultural perceptions of nature. 

There are also many goddesses represented in this exhibition, as archeological artefacts and appropriated imagery bring with them a multitude of ancient cultures and belief systems. In one display case, ten coins are positioned in a circle, so that the faces of Hera, Persephone, Nike and also Arethusa, attendant of Artemis, are turned inwards toward the others. Reminiscent of a stone circle, the arranged coins represent a matriarchal assembly. Collectively, these Greek and Roman deities were believed to preside over subjects such as grains and vegetation, marriage, women and family, the wilderness, wild animals, nature, childbirth, care of children and art and music; areas of society that are co-incidentally in a state of turbulence in our post-natural era. Through this selection of objects, the interrelation of the ecological, social and economic challenges we face is perhaps brought to the fore through their arrangement. 

In another display case there is a small ancient Egyptian amulet of the god Pataikos, flanked by Isis, Egyptian goddess of healing and magic, and Nepthys, Egyptian goddess of the air. The faience object is positioned next to a variety of female figurines from different time periods and geographical locations. Early Peruvian, Cypriot and Columbian clay forms sit alongside Egyptian and Romano-British statuettes and harpies. Nearby, objects and tools associated with the female body are also gathered for collective reinterpretation. Protective fertility amulets and jewellery are encased with a set of Bronze Age tweezers, found buried with the skeleton of a young female in Staffordshire. In the same case sits an example of prehistoric rock art recovered from a site in Barlow, displaying shapes that some speculate are land-based fertility symbols.

In these various representations, we see women tending to nature, drawing on its powers for protection and advocating on its behalf as guardians of the natural world and its mystical and creative properties. These figures are a celebration of female creativity, fertility, power and agency. In contrast, the selected works of Goya, Redon, Dürer and the Heavy Water Collective explore the claim that female power is monstrous and unwieldy, uncivilised and volatile; a popular patriarchal position that has contributed to the deep fissures between humans and nature in favour of the Cartesian ‘rational’ human subject. Through their careful positioning, these representations of witches, harpies and female deviants are reclaimed and celebrated as radical agents within the context of the exhibition. As pastoral landscapes are distorted, so too are the patriarchal legacies of femininity in the context of the post-natural. 

In Francisco Goya’s etching Feminine Folly (1816) for example, a group of women participate in the pelele, a traditional Spanish carnival game in which the tossing of a manikin by the female participants was symbolic of female power. Goya subverts this custom, instead presenting it as an allegory of women’s domination of foolish men in the context of his disturbing series entitled The Disparates (1819 - 1824). In this etching, the Donkey, a symbol of ignorance, is seemingly enveloped by the blanket and lays heavily on top of a male human form. Similarly, his reference to witches, complete with broomstick and black cat, creates a deep sense of unease. Also terrifying is the scaled creature that appears out of the darkness in Odilon Redon’s 1896 depiction of Oannes, an amphibious being borrowed from Mesopotamian mythology. The title reads ‘I, the first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate form’. Haunting and strangely beautiful, this etching speaks of a reckoning, in which a new wisdom re-shapes both the world and human’s position in it.

The four Max Ernst reproductions have been carefully selected from the one hundred and eighty two images that form his 1934 artist’s book series entitled One Semaine de Bonté, created by cutting up and reorganising illustrations from Victorian encyclopaedias and novels. In these striking collages we find mystics, with their crystal balls and floating orbs, seemingly in the act of conjuring. There are also two extraordinary works that bring together botanical illustrations with the female body, creating hybrid forms that perhaps, through the lens of the exhibition, draw upon aspects of the post-natural in relation to female sexuality more broadly. Through this method of restructuring Victorian imagery, new and shifting associations are generated that celebrate the surreal entanglement and wonder of all living things. 

The Heavy Water Collective use a similar process of deconstruction and reconstitution, responding to archives and collections to create artworks that reclaim historical narratives, and provide alternative readings, in a contemporary context. In this exhibition, they present images and objects that respond to two very different archives - The Special Collections at Cardiff University and The Sheffield General Cemetery site in Sharrow - where they undertook research residencies in 2022. In this exhibition, the Heavy Water artists, Maud Haya-Baviera, Joanna Whittle and Victoria Lucas, select source material from these sites and use it to grapple with notions of the landscape in relation to embedded socio-cultural structures. Representations of landscapes correlate with tail eating snakes, female reproductive organs, plant matter, ritual objects and strange human forms. Myth and symbolism bleed into and out of the materiality of each object, creating a constellation of fluid and mystical associations. Alongside the display case, a printed schema draws together associations through fragmentary reference points. 

Other female artists in the exhibition include Mary Potter, Gillian Ayres, Gertrude Hermes, Alice Havers and Margaret Murray Cookesley. In End of Daylight (1954), Mary Potter presents us with a natural landscape viewed through the aperture of a domestic window frame. Her colour palette is muted, the trees almost a silhouette on what might be interpreted as a hill at the end of a lawned garden. The toggle from the blind hangs in view, as the sun sets in the murky beyond. There is a distancing in this painting between the artist and her subject, viewed through the architecture that separates them. In contrast, Gillian Ayres fully immerses the viewer deep within the powerful vibrancy of matter in her extraordinary painting A Belt of Straw and Ivy Leaves (1983). Her title is borrowed from Christopher Marlowe’s 1599 poem The Passionate Shepherd, in which a Shepherd beckons his love to come live with him in among the beauty of nature. Though Ayres states that her titles do not describe the paintings, this energetic work seems to capture the atmosphere of the world that Marlowe describes, prompting the viewer to imagine themselves embedded in the rural on a hot summer’s day. 

The female artists and female subjects in the exhibition are gathered together as a way to rethink cultural representations of ‘the feminine’, so that we can begin to untangle binary notions of the feminine from our understanding of nature, in the context of the post-natural era we find ourselves in. There is an extraordinary amount of disruptive power presented in this exhibition. From trees that lift rocks, glitches that agitate form, goddesses that protect the earth, bodies that reject subjugation, geology that provides perspective and compositions that defy reality, this exhibition provides a myriad of conceptual tools that may lead to insights about how humans might begin to work with nature, as a part of post-nature. This is a show that revisits ancestrally charged values through art and artefact, while engaging with cultural tropes in a way that reclaims them from patriarchal capitalism. Like the snake, humans need to shed their essentialist notions of the feminine - both from women’s bodies and from nature more broadly - so that we can see the vibrant matter that exists beneath the surface of all living things. Until then, the ouroboros will remain a warning sign of the world to come for mere humans - as re-contextualised by Lucas’ sculpture Self-Destructive Acts (2023) - rather than maintaining its intended purpose as a symbol of the cosmological unity of all things. 

Written by Victoria Lucas, March 2023

Photography: Julian Lister

POSTNATURES:

Thu 16 March - Sat 2 December 2024

Graves Gallery, Surrey Street, Sheffield, S1 1XZ

This exhibition, curated by artist Victoria Lucas, is centred around JMW Turner’s painting The Festival of the Opening of the Vintage at Mâcon.

PostNatures sees Lucas draw on the constructed composition of Turner’s painting to highlight how imaginary subjects can affect our individual or cultural perceptions of reality. The exhibition features a range of artworks and objects from Sheffield’s collections which depict other representations of the relationship between women and nature, alongside recent works from Victoria Lucas and the Heavy Water Collective. Together, they invite us to rethink and further explore ideas of the feminine in nature.

The exhibition is generously supported by the Ampersand Foundation.

Visit Graves Gallery

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