Tatton Park Biennial: Sited Commissions
SIMON POPE has related his memories of walks through the Italian Alps to a Cheshire water-colourist Mike Hoyles, who, in turn,painted from the artist’s memory.
A pocketbook of watercolours, depicting scenes of Alpine lakes and mountains, produced through dialogue between Simon Pope and watercolourist Mike Hoyles.
Italy bears a strong influence on Tatton Park, with paintings of Milan, prints of Venetian palaces and the Italian Garden itself. Indeed, this influence is expressed in the late Lady Egerton's own watercolours: paintings of the Italian Lakes and mountains. These depictions of the landscapes, which would be approximated in British garden design, now find prominence in the collection.
This new work adopts Lady Egerton's techniques for identifying and recording significant views, to explore the relationship of these depictions to contemporary and historical ideas of 'the wild' and the picturesque.
Where Lady Egerton's watercolours are likely to have been painted in situ, in this new work the alpine scenes are retrieved from memory. Having walked in the Italian Alps and travelled back to Tatton Park, Simon Pope entered into dialogue with watercolourist Mike Hoyles: a small pocketbook of watercolours was produced with Simon's descriptions of alpine views, as a composite of imagined and remembered landscape, in a format akin to those paintings now found in the collection at Tatton Park's Mansion house.
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Simon Pope with Mike Hoyles |
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watercolour of Italian Alps by Lady Mary Egerton
courtesy Tatton Park / Cheshire County Council /
The National Trust
Biography
Simon Pope is an artist and Reader in Fine Art at Cardiff School of Art & Design. Through his art practice he investigates the processes of encoding into memory and subsequent recall and articulation, often inviting participants to transport memories between locations through walking.
Recent works include: The Memorial Walks (2006-7) for Film & Video Umbrella; London Bridge Recall (2007) for Danielle Arnaud contemporary art and Gallery Space Recall (2006) at Chapter, Cardiff.
Recent commissions include: Charade for BBC/ACE and Walking Here & There, in collaboration with the psychologist Vaughan Bell, for the Wellcome Trust. He represented Wales at their inaugural exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Fine Art, producing The Ambulant Science Studio (2003), the book London Walking (2000) and as a member of I/O/D produced the new media artwork The Web Stalker (1997). A former NESTA Fellow (2002-05), Simon is also a research associate at Transmedia, Hogeschool Sint Lukas, Brussels where he runs the research project Walking Together, a study of modes of sociality and walking in contemporary Visual Art practice. Simon
was in residence at the ICA, London in February 2008, writing imaginary dialogues with the artist André Cadere (2008).
Simon lives in London and Devon, UK and works in Cardiff, UK and Brussels, Belgium.
Mike Hoyles
Cheshire Artist/Teacher/Demonstrator