eggebert-and-gould

Anne Eggebert also collaborates with Polly Gould as eggebert-and-gould. They make site-specific multi-media works that explore the history, architecture, and landscape of a site in order to engage the audience in a critical appreciation of what may be forgotten stories. They work with people, collections, museums and archives, botanic gardens and landscapes (both real and imagined). ‘Operating in locations used to promote knowledge or collate certain domains of thought, their work often subverts, unravels, or plays at the edges of presented discourses’¹.

They began their collaboration in 1999 at the British Library where they installed a sound work around the glass tower of the King’s Library editing together extracts from the Oral History collection of the National Sound Archive. During 2001 Year of the Artist they were the first ever artists in residence at Cambridge University Botanic Garden. Their work In the Botanic Garden included drawings, sound, video and photographic works installed amongst the plant collection in the glass houses, while Transplantation took transformed images of the Cambridge garden to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, Australia. They have also shown at Hasting Museum and Art Gallery; Bury Art Gallery and Museum, Manchester; and Haus am Lutzowplatz, Berlin. Recent exhibitions include 'Crossing Over' at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and 'Altered Sequence' at E:vent.

In August 2002 they were awarded Arts Council National Touring Programme funding for nature and nation: vaster than empires. This project, conceived, developed and curated by eggebert-and-gould was an exhibition, publication and schools internet project exploring contested territories – geographical and symbolic; place and landscape; garden and wilderness; culture and horticulture.

They have recently been commissioned to develop a major public artwork for the new gateway to Milton Keynes.

Notes

¹ Transmission: Speaking and Listening Vol 3 ed. Kivland, Sanderson and Cocker (2004)

nature and nation: vaster than empires

tiong ang fiona hall sharon kivland rosemary laing karl maughan shaheen merali jacques nimki raqib shaw roy villevoye

Nation: the cultural construction of our identities, sits next to Nature: not limited by the borders that human vanities might go to war over, cartographers go to pains to draw or economies contrive to maintain. This nature is ‘vaster than empires'. nature and nation brings together the work of contemporary artists from Australia, France, India, Indonesia, Mauritius, The Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK whose work examines contested territories, both geographic and symbolic. The selected artists all deal with some aspect of the representation of nature in relation to colonial histories and national identity.

Tiong Ang was born in Surabaya, Indonesia. In his mesmerising video installations Ang uses a mixture of staged scenes with documentary footage to evoke a dream state of being cut off from society. It is this constant state of ambivalence and dislocation that allows the individual to recognise their own state of belonging and alienation within the global sphere. Fiona Hall is an Australian artist working with botanical specimens and systems of classification. She uses these to reveal the social and economic dynamics of exploitation that characterises the history of botanical collecting and exchange. When My Boat Comes In demonstrates this through detailed botanic illustrations painted upon banknotes. Sharon Kivland is an artist, writer, and occasional curator, living in France and London. She was commissioned to produce a new work for nature and nation for Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and responded to the Markwick Diaries held in their collection. Her subtle use of fragments of text as the material for her artwork highlights how nature is represented through language, evoking intimate relationships to time, ownership and history. Rosemary Laing is an Australian artist living and working in Sydney. For her series groundspeed she photographed floral carpets, which she installed into natural environments, resulting in a seamless cohabitation of domestic material and vegetable matter. Karl Maughan is a London based artist born in New Zealand who paints vast garden panoramas in a painterly style with a heightened palette, composed from references from photographs taken of gardens around the world. He has painted a new work Wollaton Hall as a commission for nature and nation for the Yard Gallery at Nottingham. Shaheen Merali is a visual artist, curator and educator of Indian descent, currently living and working in Berlin. His work in the show exploits the discourses around craft techniques versus high art practices presenting a critical view of post-colonial power relations between peoples and the control of their local environment. Jacques Nimki is a London based artist. He works with large fine drawings of plants defined as weeds, or fills a painting with detailed painted images of plant matter and pressed weeds. All his works are 'florilegiums', after the 17th century catalogues of valuable plant collections. He has made a new florilegium for Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery in response to weeds gathered locally. Indian born, UK based Raqib Shaw juxtaposes the studies of exotic flowering plants grown in the Himalayas with drawings and illustrations from the Renaissance using a rich, ornate technique. Roy Villevoye is a Dutch artist who mainly works with photographs and video footage shot during his travels in Papua New Guinea and India. While these works engage in a critical dialogue with the heritage of anthropological photography and film, they also reflect Villevoye’s background in painting in numerous ways, both drawing on and undermining various traditions.

nature and nation consists of a visual arts exhibition, publication and internet project www.virtualherbarium.net

Curated by eggebert-and-gould in partnership with Hastings Museum and Art Gallery. Supported by Arts Council England National Touring Programme, Commissions East, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design – University of the Arts London.

nature and nation: vaster than empires

ed. eggebert-and-gould

This 160 page publication includes ten essays from writer/artists, geographers, art historians, and cultural commentators. The writers were asked to examine the way nature is culturally constructed, aesthetically represented, and expressed through the written word. The colonising aesthetic of the lawn, the language of encroachment, the experience of nature as ornament and product are some of the subjects explored in this cross-disciplinary collection.

The writers are: Charles Allen - writer and social historian; author of 'Plain Tales of the Raj' 1977 and 'The Buddha and the Sahibs' 1992; Paul Domela Nieuwenhuis - Deputy Cheif Executive of the Liverpool Biennial; Ivan Gaskell - Curator of Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; author of 'Vermeer's Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Museums' 2000; Polly Gould - artist, curator and writer and lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, UAL; Kitty Hauser - historian, tutor at Ruskin School of Fine Art Oxford, and Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge; Isabel Hoving - lecture in Literature at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands; Angus Jeffery - PhD on 'The British Lawn and Climate Change' at the University of Cambridge; V Ramaswamy - visiting faculty member in Urban Sociology at the Department of Architecture, Jadavpur University, Kolkata - his essay is illustrated by Achinto - a Calcutta based photographer; Dr Steve Trudgill - senior lecturer, Geography Department, Cambridge University; Joanna Walker - PhD student Department of Architecture at Cambridge University; Julian Walker - artist and writer and first artist in residence at the Natural History Museum, London.

Also included are images of work by the exhibiting artists. This was on sale at the touring venues, Tate Britain during the Art of the Garden exhibition, the British Library during the Writer in the Garden exhibition and is available from Amazon Books.