Jason Gathorne-Hardy Animals in the Landscape
Life drawings and sketches of animals from coastal Suffolk
The landscape of East Suffolk is soft and watery. Coastal estuaries give way to shallow river valleys covered by water meadows and woodland. These, in turn, yield to the heavy clay uplands of mid Suffolk, a land of oak trees and wheat.
The sketches and drawings in this exhibition record various walks and journeys through this landscape, along the lengths of the Rivers Alde and Deben, seen through meetings with animals: a stormy walk with dogs at the mouth of the Alde; a gang of off-duty rams in a field; a goose in April; a plover scuttling across mudflats in search of food. They are tokens of moments in the landscape.
Jason Gathorne-Hardy
Animals in the Landscape
The drawings of cattle are part of an ongoing series about a Red Poll herd at Blackheath in Suffolk. The Red Poll is one of the 'Suffolk Trinity' of rare breeds - alongside the Suffolk Punch and the Suffolk Sheep. The breed was popular in the early to mid 20th Century as a dual purpose breed of cow, producing both milk and beef. As continental breeds became more widespread in UK during the second half of the 20th Century, the Red Poll became increasingly rare in its home county of Suffolk. This trend was reversed in the first decade of the new century as feed prices rose and beef prices fluctuated. The Red Poll herd at Blackheath is one of the largest in Suffolk. The cows graze on water meadows and heath land near the Alde Estuary.
The drawings of seaguls and estuary riverscapes celebrate the wildness of the River Alde as it passes Slaughden at Aldeburgh. The river at this point reaches to within 100 yards of the North Sea, before turning sharply South for 8 miles. Its passage is blocked by a thin rise of the shingle that was once the home of Slaughden - a small hamlet of fishing huts, cottages and a pub. Slaughden itself was washed away in 1953, but the rise of land retains the name, before giving way to the long thin peninsula known as Orfordness. The land at this point is at times a bit magical, swept by wind, sea, tides and the river. The saltings at Slaughden, laid out below the Martello Tower, are buffeted by salty tides. When the weather blows in hard from the South West, the ground - a thick layer of muddy peat - often shudders at the impact of waves from the river. Overhead, the sky is often dramatic. The river defines a line on the ground abover which weather fronts collide and mix. The edge of the saltings is consequently an exciting place to draw. It is a point in the land at which the elements collide. The seaguls animate this mix of elements - of wind, land and water. They punctuate it,, vigorously tracing their paths of flight in the great volumes of air that blow over the river.
Jason Gathorne-Hardy, White House Farm, July 2009 |
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