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“Dirt, leaves, terracotta shards, and what looks like a torn-out page from a diary are encased in a plastic bag and encircled by a magmatic cloud, cast in aluminium.
The light dimly shines on its rugged surface: its crevasses and fluidity reminiscent of voluptuous, unfurling intestines.
Indebted to both archaeological study and the long tradition of landscape images, British artist Emily Fielding's "Documentation of a Field in Cheshire" inherently deals with the visceral. Earth is the ultimate bowel; biological life digests, shits out and eats itself all over again, cyclically staging its own metamorphic metabolization. We come from the soil and to it we return. Hostile to time and change, the genre of landscape painting has historically been part of human attempts to take matter out of this cannibalistic loop and into the hands of civilization.
Fielding's dreamy unearthing is different. Joseph Cornell's boxes meet rural England. The work delivers a selection of fragments, and the result is that we are offered a glimpse of memory rather than scientific documentation. The scenery is compressed into the narrow space of the silver frame, which functions as both window and vessel. Its contents are neither fixed nor completely unveiled, and, as I focus my gaze, I begin to mentally reconstruct the Cheshire field seen by Fielding on that day.
The dry soil reminds me of a winter's afternoon, when the sun is low and cold, the earth granular and crunchy.
The written words echo in my mind: I see a figure crouched in the middle of the countryside, pen racing across the page of their notebook as silver clouds cover the sky. The field is captured in both imaginative and earthly forms; its geological substrate reembodied inside Fielding's metal frame, but - the soil reminds us - only temporarily.
As the cosmic digestion takes place, the artist is in the midst of it all: hands and leaves and language and earth.”
* Greta Schödl – Straßenpoesie (1980)
* The poem and the stone carry equal weight (2024)
* Notes on Emily Fielding’s Documentation of a Field in Cheshire (2024)
* Cloud Traces (2024)
* We looked in vain at the darkness (2023)
* Reviews
* Interviews