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Philip Hughes Vaucluse Ridgeway Orkney 19 May - 17 June 2010 |
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| Sarsen Stones |
View from the Terrace, Menerbes |
Maes Howe |
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acrylic and gouache on paper , 2009
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aquacryl and gouache on paper, 2008 |
acrylic, gouache on paper and print, 2009 |
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26
x 43in 67 x 108cm |
23
x 30in 58 x 76cm |
28
x 41in 72 x 105cm |
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| Silbury in Mist |
Merry Maidens |
House I, Skara Brae |
| aquacry, pastel and gouache on paper , 2008 |
pencil on paper ,2000 |
etching,
ed. 25, 2010 |
| 28
x 39in 71 x 100cm |
49
x 35in 123 x 88cm |
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Philip Hughes For all the wide span of Philip Hughes’ engagement with the ‘archaeology of landscape’ – a preoccupation with sacred sites which over thirty years has taken him from the Andes and the Himalayas to the aboriginal sanctuaries of Australia – three regions much closer to his European roots still maintain a dominant hold on his imagination: the valleys and gorges of the Vaucluse; the islands of Orkney; and the Ridgeway in Wiltshire. It is to these that the artist has returned for the present exhibition, finding fresh reasons why each of these pivotal locations resonates with his deepest concerns. As the two locations in the British Isles containing the greatest concentration of Neolithic sites, Orkney and Wiltshire have provided Hughes with an ongoing succession of characteristic subjects, some having their origin in the newest discoveries in archaeology. At the cutting edge of technology now deployed in this field, a revolutionary scanning technique has only recently revealed unsuspected structures below the surface in sites not fully excavated such as the Circle of Brodgar and the Beehive tomb at Maes Howe, adding another dimension to Hughes’ interpretations. Since playing a leading role in the Gallery’s original Ridgeway exhibition in 1986, Hughes has regularly worked in the region and now he returns to the great mound of Silbury, Europe’s largest Neolithic structure, which, however familiar, ‘exerts an hypnotic attraction the longer you are there’. Massive and still mysterious as ever within its surroundings so carefully chosen in relation to the Downs and the valley of the Kennet and possibly ringed originally, as some now speculate, by a man-made lake (an hypothesis which may also apply to the mounds and stone circles on Orkney), Silbury has a presence (as Paul Nash saw it) as a ‘landscape which asserts itself with all the force of its triumphant fusion of natural and artificial design’. The exhibition is completed with a small group of Hughes’ distinctive, large-scale pencil drawings executed entirely on site at other locations in the British Isles, from West Cornwall to Kilmartin in Argyll, distilling the esssence of these numinous settings punctuated by multiple as well as individually positioned stone monoliths, themselves symbols or metaphors for enduring social structures. Biography
Comment Philip Hughes’ work has long been rooted in his love of landscapes and this exhibition assembles painting and drawing from the three locations that have intrigued and haunted him most: Wiltshire and Orkney in Britain and Vaucluse in France. Like many British landscapists before him, Philip’s works first take form as drawings, and the spare, sinuous, ambling line remains always the essence of his images, even those to which he later adds colour. If there is thread uniting these works it is the way man places his mark upon the landscape: both physically—by erecting great mounds of earth and lines of standing stones, by cultivating it, and by marking paths through it with coloured symbols; and conceptually—by drawing it, mapping it and, in recent times, by using scientific techniques to image the ancient remains still buried in the ground. Philip’s antiquarian interests, particularly in the standing stones, ridgeways and barrows of Wiltshire and Orkney, take us back to the origins of the British landscape drawing, both picturesque and topographical. The monuments of Britain’s prehistoric past – “the installation art of 5,000 years ago,” as he says, weathered and melted over the ages to become itself part of nature’s domain—have much the same emotive magnetism to him that ancient Rome and Athens did to the romantics. Until the advent of photography, drawing was the only way to record their likenesses and positions on a map; and such drawing served a scientific as well as an artistic aim. Today new imaging techniques allow archaeologists to see into a barrow or under the ground, and works like Maes Howe and Brodgar Circle: Green create a new fusion of the analytical and the artistic by juxtaposing his drawings with maps and modern resistivity images. This time however the analytical elements serve an ultimately artistic purpose rather than vice versa. The views of Mts Luberon and Ventoux, the world Philip has looked out on for over 30 years from his house, reflect the brighter light and dramatically coloured seasonality of France. Here again it is when man makes accidentally aesthetic interventions that his interest is drawn: the splashes of colour on tree trunks that mark the trails through the Luberon. These interventions, like those of ancient man in Britain, are of a kind that was still in balance with nature—a balance we have so spectacularly lost. Timothy Potts, Director, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Orkney – ‘The Wessex of the North’, or Wessex - ‘The Orkney of the South? Carefully re-examining the iconic Neolithic sites of Wiltshire reveals surprising further parallels. Skara Brae houses densely packed onto the bank of the enormous Durrington henge, new henges revealed through painstaking geophysical and other survey. And Silbury hill – as enigmatic and resistant to our survey techniques as the much smaller Salt Know in Orkney, fondly known as mini-Sibury. Art/Archaeology- Archaeology/Art - Built landscapes of intense activity, buildings of great beauty as archaeologists we micro-record and turn everything into 2-D plots, plans and maps. We forget where we are in our standardised practices and routines. These pieces cause us to stop, refresh our view, appreciate perspective, colour and the wonder in a different interpretation. Dr Jane Downes,Head of Archaeology, Orkney College UHI. Prehistorian Archive Please click to access Philip Hughes' archive
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