Uncommon Ground Land Art in Britain Exhibition Review

Uncommon Ground

Land Art in Britain

1966-1979

Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain is a touring exhibition that I visited in its new temporary home inside the National Museum Cardiff, where there are 1-5 different levels where exhibitions are showcased, museum exhibitions are located and many different information sources are to be found. The museum itself holds 500 years of all types of history including art from Tudor times to the present day.
Uncommon Ground is showcasing in the National Museum Cardiff from 28.09.2013 – 05.01.2014. The exhibition is a group exhibition with artists who are considered

“The most important British artists of the last 50 years”

This is printed onto the front of the leaflets for this particular exhibition and I immediately wanted to see what was so important about them!
Artists include Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Susan Hiller, Richard Long, Keith Arnatt, Hamish Fulton and David Nash.

The show was organised and is being curated from the Arts Council Collection and can read more about it here at:

http://uncommonground-artscouncilcollection.org.uk

          My first initial thoughts on the exhibition were thoughts that unravelled the longer I spent really looking at the images and the art that was being displayed on the walls and on the floors. This was a very visually demanding exhibition and was also a very textural display. The exhibition consisted of bright white walls, very clean, and masses of empty spaces around all of the work and the surrounding areas of the exhibition rooms itself and the most beautiful wooden floors. It was split into two halves, one half being in one side of the archway and the other on the other side. Walking into the big simple room I was greeted by an extremely large circle of stones, forming a very neat and
very simple circle in the middle of the floor of the first room which was created by Richard Long in 1972 and consisted of 61 stones in total.

           The room itself was very easily directed and all in all was a very visually leading exhibition. Although there was no exact route to the work being shown I was never really wandering around trying to find something to look at because there always was something. Wall after wall there was another image or another piece of visual art to look at and interoperate and the room being very bright and plain kept the mind from wondering. Something that really caught my eye was the huge font stencilled onto the white wall of the second room, big blue title of the exhibition and the dates. I have never before seen this in any other exhibition so far and really enjoyed the scale of it.

            Disadvantages of the exhibitions was that the visual art of the show was very tempting and inviting to touch and yet was restricted from doing so by small labels, signs and barriers to prevent any touching of the exhibition itself. However this allowed the mind to be completely teased by the ideas of what it could possibly feel like and having to leave without ever knowing the exact texture to it.
Inside one of the rooms there was a small but bulky television sat on top of a thick white rectangular podium. This screen was showing a slideshow of images but what really got me thinking was, why have they chose to use a big, bulky and outdated television instead of the slim sleek screens we are all so used to these days. I finally agreed on the fact that using a modern flat screen simply wouldn’t have the same effect at all as this big bulky screen did. I also thought about travel and transportation of the screen, if it is to be moved around from place to place it is less likely to be damaged because of the amount of outer protection it has.
The rooms had incredibly high ceilings which carried sound through to the other room therefore it was an extremely quiet environment allowing thoughts to hatch. One thing that I really admired was the spacing around the framed images. Some images were framed with a thick black boarder, some had a white one and some had a grey one. The exhibition had an earthy feel to it but also didn’t overpower the viewers with economy views or beliefs in any way it was more subliminal and subconscious feelings that the photographs and their surroundings portrayed.

              The work itself included a range of sizes of prints most of them had incredibly large spacing around the images which were drawing the eyes into the image closer. This technique of engaging the viewer with the image intrigued me very much as I didn’t realise that a simple frame with space around an image could draw so much attention to the image itself. I also liked the simplicity of the information plaques located at the side of each image and 3D artefacts. A simple plain white plaque with small yet simple font was just enough information to let the viewer know exactly what was happening in the image or 3D visual. The prints were very flat against the walls with shallow frames which allowed a great deal of light onto the images making them clearly visible. However on the 3D artefacts the spot lighting was angled in a way that the shadows that were being cast really complimented the details that were obviously trying to shown.

                The audience is a tricky one to pin point with this exhibition. I felt that it was not aimed at minors in any way as it was too open and blank and not very visually engaging for younger viewers. I felt that it was much more aimed towards the older generation and art students which were generally the kinds of people attending this exhibition. Overall I really enjoyed the exhibition as it was a real awakening experience to the beauty that is around us every day in nature and how to capture this beauty. The artists really portrayed a wonderful sense of earthiness and pure rawness of the nature filled shots. The exhibition maybe could of gave a little bit more away in the sense of texture as I left the museum wondering what exactly that 3D artefact of the stone canvas felt like but all in all it was a beautiful display of photography and 3D art.