This exhibition brings together visual work by Glasgow-based artists Kate Holford and Pippa Thomas for the first time. ‘Death by Landscape’ brings together visual work by Glasgow-based artists Kate Holford and Pippa Thomas for the first time.
Both artists’ practices consider gender and ecological collapse, and the ways in which violence has been enacted upon women and nature, in particular through land occupation and control. In part, their shared research touches on historic episodes of capitalist development and its legacy into the present day. For this exhibition, the artists have each developed a new body of work during a residency with 16 Collective that traces slippages of perception, notions of distance and intimacy, and how these play out across landscapes. The resulting large-scale installations will take the gallery space as their stage, acting in dialogue – with each other, with the gloaming time of winter – inviting visitors to consider the disquiet within landscapes close and far away, familiar or made alien.
Kate’s recent research and making has considered violence, tragedy, and muteness, and the spectre of female peril within rural landscapes. It has also considered the forensic gaze, the significance of framing, and the power dynamics of subjective storytelling.
She specifically explores gender constructs and the expression or withholding of women’s perspectives, deploying the supposed “unreliability” of emotion. Within her work, she has also explored the encroachment of, and extraction from, nature, in tension and relation with the human-centric story happening within it. Exploiting dynamics between truth and fiction, she integrates text and slippery forms of storytelling into her installations, drawings and paintings, with a particular interest on the political potentials of fiction. Elsewhere, she has produced multi-form publications and extended text works, habitually integrating the photographic image as ciphers, distancing, agitating, or denying narrative. Finding inspiration in folklore and ecology, Pippa works to unpick the complexities and nuances of womanhood, hurt and healing, whilst examining wider themes of human destruction, and in turn, nature’s persistent reclamation and recovery. She is specifically interested in the ‘boundary’ between human and nature and our ever-changing, dynamic relationship.
Recently, Pippa’s critical research has interrogated the Capitalist ideology that to enjoy nature we must take or manipulate it. Pippa’s material investigations work against the temptation for artistic practice to extract from nature to produce cultural value. Instead, she creates drawings and installations from recycled materials, exploring their material history and accepting the ephemerality that comes with generating works from pre-used matter. Both our work considers gender and ecological collapse, and the ways in which violence and extraction has historically – and continually – been enacted upon women and the natural world.
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