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EDGE:LANDS. Catalogue of drawings and paintings by Paul Gough

Gough, Paul

EDGE:LANDS. Catalogue of drawings and paintings by Paul Gough Thumbnail


Authors

Paul Gough



Abstract

EDGE:LANDS
Sketching somewhere and nowhere

Paul Gough is interested in drawing in-between places, liminal zones, waste grounds, empty places that were once something and now have been allowed to lapse back into their habitual shape. Look at his drawings of the former airbase at Greenham Common, or the ash-heaps of the old north Somerset coalfield, the abandoned village of Tyneham or the forlorn gullies on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They are powerful evocations of absence and embedded memory. Writer Marion Shoard coined these unloved, unseen and often unexplored spaces as the ‘edge land’, a mysterious hinterland of brick piles and rubbish tips, derelict industrial plant and ragged landfill, forlorn filling stations and scruffy allotments, abandoned ordnance lying amidst rogue plants.

Thirty years ago, the naturalist Richard Mabey in his book ‘The Unofficial Countryside ‘, had also opened our eyes to the vitality of these unkempt places. He, however, found little to cherish and celebrate in these wasted hinterlands. Instead he marvelled at the resilience of nature in such abject conditions, its refusal to be ground down by toxic contagion.

Mabey’s astonishment at the hardiness of nature is a reminder of another astute observer of the English scene, the painter Paul Nash. Before the Great War a modest painter of fluffy elms and vapid sunsets, Nash was transformed by his experiences while serving as a British officer on the Western Front in 1916.

In 1916, in a letter home he wrote of walking through a wood (or at least what remained of it after recent shelling) when it was little more than ‘a place with an evil name, pitted and pocked with shells, the trees torn to shreds, often reeking with poison gas’. A few days later, to his great surprise, that ‘most desolate ruinous place’ was drastically changed. It was now ‘a vivid green’, bristling with buds and fresh leaf growth:

‘The most broken trees even had sprouted somewhere and in the midst, from the depth of the wood’s bruised heart poured out the throbbing song of a nightingale. Ridiculous mad incongruity! One can’t think which is the more absurd, the War or Nature…’

Nash’s ecstatic vision permeates Gough’s recent oeuvre. Over the past decade his drawings and paintings have reflected a dread fascination with poetic dereliction and the quasi-industrial sublime, borne of long sojourns in and around many such No-Man’s-Lands.

More recently, two young British poets have also wandered in (and wondered of) the hinterlands that make up the British banlieue. To Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts the wilderness is much closer than any of us think. They describe the English edgeland as a set of familiar yet ignored spaces, ‘passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged’, which are now the new wild places on our very own doorsteps. Theirs is a compelling vision, shared in Gough’s many images of former sites of battle, abandoned workings and ancient slagheaps, a land riddled with trenches and troughs, adits and mineholes, ivoried elm and wild buddleia.

Gough’s drawings are not representations of any one particular scene. Instead they are accretions of places, spaces, times and seasons brought together on to a single surface; they are sites of both legend and anonymity, places emptied and yet full of emptiness, dis-membered topographies that have had their constituent parts re-membered through the act of drawing.
In his drawings, created over decades of measured practice, Gough has laid vision to his own complicated, unkempt and previously unexamined edgeland. He has made tangible those places that have long thrived on disregard. In his work he meets the challenge that we should ‘put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known and see them afresh’.



M.R.H.








Paul Farley and Michael Symmonds Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, 2011.

Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside, 1973.

Marion Shoard, Edgelands: an essay, 2002.

Citation

Gough, P. (2012). EDGE:LANDS. Catalogue of drawings and paintings by Paul Gough. Bristol

Other Type Other
Publication Date Nov 11, 2012
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Peer Reviewed Not Peer Reviewed
Keywords Paul Gough, exhibitions, landscape, battlefields
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/941911
Additional Information Additional Information : Accompanied a one-person show in Bath, 5th November - 30th November 2012.BATH ROYAL LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTION JENYNS GALLERY.

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