Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/474298
Born and raised in the Cornish countryside, and belonging to a family of farmers, Geoff Uglow understands the tradition of working the land in response to its rhythms and cycles. It is this dialogue which informs his practice: "My love of the British landscape came before painting. Painting is merely the medium I have used to develop a relationship with it". Since graduating from Glasgow School of Art with First-Class Honours in 2000, Uglow has journeyed across the UK, from the barren terrain of Barra to the smuggler's coastline of Cornwall. Throughout this time he has re-defined the parameters of British landscape painting, bringing it into a contemporary context. As his work has developed, he has reduced the landscape into its most fundamental components. In his earlier series Quercus Robur the image of the deep-rooted oak tree stands as symbol of nature's longevity. In this body of work Uglow has further refined the pictorial elements. Returning to his local surroundings in Launceston, he conveys the beauty of the area, which he knows so intimately, through colour and texture alone. Uglow recorded his response to each day last year in a single square painted panel, 15 x 17 cms. The days have been collected and assembled into months and presented as they would appear in a wall calendar. Through the physicality of this configuration, Uglow charts the seasonal changes of the passing months. Each individual shade and hue has been sourced from details within the changing landscape around him: the petals of a bluebell, the bark of a silver birch, the light falling upon a patch of hedgerow. With this seminal piece he distils the landscape into its purest forms: "I begin with something complex and wish to reduce it to find its essence". Despite the incidental arrangement of the coloured panels, there is a systematic structure to the work. The installation conveys the fundamental order Uglow perceives in the landscape itself: "In nature everything seems so well designed and works so perfectly". Much like the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth, with which Uglow is well acquainted, this assemblage resonates with William Paley's 'Argument by Design' that equates nature to a perfectly designed clock, with all of its parts working in harmony. There is a mathematical quality to MMXIV's precision. Interlocking individual fragments make up the whole. Days; months; year. Yet, as in the natural world, there is a sense of chaos and growth as the thickness of the paint moves over the edge of each panel, giving the work a more softened,