Purbeck, Penwith and Purnululu: paintings and drawings from the recent past by Paul Gough

Curated by Violet M. McClean

A pop-up show organised by TheGallery, Arts University Bournemouth

Exhibition information

A Vast and Crowded Emptiness

“I first visited Australia in 2009 and moved here four years later to take up a job at RMIT University in Melbourne. Having been raised in a military family for 18 years I was accustomed to moving frequently, often to distant lands: ‘posted’ as the British armed forces call it, like a parcel, with a few possessions, and planted in some foreign clime. Apparently, it makes you ‘adaptable and resilient’.

To a northern European, there is much about the state of Victoria, or at least Melbourne, that outwardly looks familiar: bushy-topped trees, weather that changes daily (often hourly); terraced streets, high-rise apartment blocks, cosmopolitan lifestyle, a diverse multi-ethnic population.

I could navigate all of that with some confidence, but for weeks I kept turning the wrong way; everything seemed back-to-front. Although it rose in the east and set in the west, the northward travel of the climbing sun gave me an uneasy feeling. My sense of direction was compromised: it took months to reset. Many visitors from the Northern Hemisphere have been equally unnerved by no longer being ‘on the right side of the earth’ (as DH Lawrence wrote in Kangaroo) ‘as if everything had gone wrong’.

Nothing went wrong for long, but I had to recalibrate my directional sensibilities. I learned to appreciate anew the fall of light, the movement of shadow, and the impact on surface and texture, which was in a brighter register that mildly alarmed the more muted sensibilities of my northern soul.

Within weeks of landing in January 2014, I set out with drawing boards and paints down the coast; up to the Grampians; across to the alps; camping and hiking with my adventurous family as the perfect fellow explorers.

Over the years we ventured further, to the Top End to experience the poetic magic of Arnhem Land and Kakadu; thousands of kilometres up the coast of Western Australia; baking summers in the Flinders Ranges and long days drawing the white and pink desert of Lake Mungo. Then another year, an epic voyage into the Red Centre, across the MacDonnell Ranges, Lake Amadeus, Uluru, Kata Tjuta. More recently, we made an epic autumn trek through the Kimberley, traversing croc-filled rivers and navigating the rutted surface of the endless Great Gibb Road.

It sounds like a roll call of remarkable places, and it was, but it also gave us a unique opportunity to meet many remarkable people. Spending days with the Elders and rangers on the border of Victoria and New South Wales was rich and revelatory and so moving. I learned that appreciating the infinite emptiness of the interior drew on every one of my senses, not just what my eyes could see, but what could be felt, intuited, absorbed. Australia is a place for wandering and wondering.

The paintings and drawings in this modest catalogue represent a portion of our experiences as a family. Often it was physically impossible to paint and draw, not just because of the practical discomforts, the searing heat and the piercing light, but more often it was the sheer spectacle of saturated colour, of infinite spaces and sounds of the gusting wind that would stop us, quite literally, in our tracks, or more often the invisible tracks of unseen feet that had trodden this way for tens of thousands of years”.

West Penwith, Cornwall

Around St Just, where Gough walks, looks and stops to paint, the fields and valleys sides are still littered with the debris of a bustling industrial past: ruin-strewn edge lands, broken pit-heads, derelict blowing houses, the partially healed scars of open mining, imposing chimney stacks, the husks of beam engine housing, and bizarre streaks of colour on the cliffs where liquids have leached from the heavy metal workings.

It's an enchanting place: a quite unique blend of the truly ancient – megalithic and beyond – and the contemporary industrial sublime: the leftovers of a forlorn mining industry that came to a sudden end as the global price of heavy metals fell and kept falling.

The Isle of Purbeck, Dorset

Gough’s paintings and drawings of the Isle of Purbeck aren't always representations of any one specific scene. Instead, they're accretions of places, spaces, times and seasons brought together on to a single surface; they're sites of both legend and anonymity, places emptied and yet full of emptiness, dismembered topographies that have had their constituent parts re-membered through the act of drawing.

Albert Camus wrote that an artist’s work is "nothing but a slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence their heart first opened." Here, in this remarkable isle, with its wind-scoured headlands and snug woodlands, Gough has opened his senses, and at times his heart, to the genus loci – the ‘spirit of place’ - of this, a phantasmagorical land.

Purnululu

These works of a land that has been trodden for tens of thousands of years provoke a connection and relationship between place, space and the ethereal. It connects the materiality of what comes from the earth; reconnecting it through the possibility of relationships between two planes (earth and of the earth); and places both of those things in relation to what is above it, and yet present in it.

That is, spirituality and the ethereal. This is the plane that oversees place and space and creates the opportunity of connections through being, above, below and in.

The shifts in shape of the ethereal object are informed by the presences of all things above us. Yet, what's above gives comfort to what's below by having a shape that invites enquiry and belonging. Being watched over rather being taken over. The comfort of being in relation to that presence allows me to know that it too has come from place.

Over the years Gough has ventured across this astonishing island – to the Top End to experience the poetic magic of Arnhem Land and Kakadu; thousands of kilometres up the coast of Western Australia; baking summers in the Flinders Ranges and long days painting the white and pink desert of Lake Mungo. Then another year, an epic voyage into the Red Centre, across the MacDonnell Ranges, Lake Amadeus, Uluru, Kata Tjuta. More recently, an epic autumn trek through the Kimberley, traversing croc-filled rivers and navigating the rutted surface of the endless Great Gibb Road. This small selection of artwork reflects the sublime, often terrifying, majesty of this ancient land.

Warbarrow

The landscape around Warbarrow Bay is memorable for the huge painted numbers that dot the ridge; numbers that indicate the targets laid out by the military for gunnery practice. Many years ago, Gough was commissioned by a tank regiment – the King's Royal Hussars – to make paintings for the officers' mess at Wool. As part of the programme of work he went on live firing exercises all across the Isle of Purbeck. This offered a unique way to appraise a militarised landscape, which relates to much of his published work on landscapes of conflict.

Later, Gough was commissioned by the Royal Marines and made paintings and drawing of landing craft and other military machines at their base in Hamworthy, near Poole. Shapes, textures and motifs from these on-the-spot works made their way into larger, more imaginative works, some of which – a large triptych – have been given on permanent loan by a private collector to the University's art collection.

Winspit

The cliffs along the Purbeck coast are spectacularly holed by deep quarries. Their dark interiors are propped up by pillars of hewn rock. Gough drew these stone features in his first months at AUB, incorporating them into fantastic compositions along with a lily-shaped flower motif derived from a sequence of paintings made of exotic plants in Australia.

Gough exhibited these plant and flower works in Melbourne as part of a multi-outcome project funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant, which also resulted in a book, a symposium and a body of paintings, drawings and photographs in collaboration with three leading artists from Victoria, Australia.

Landscapes Fantastique

The painter Paul Nash described the dystopian scenery of the Western Front of Ypres and the Somme as a 'phantasmagoric landscape'. It's a terrible but poetic phrase that resonates with Gough's work. Very often these aren't renditions of a single scene, rather they're composites of many places blended into new vistas. He describes them as 'edgelands', places that exist in the interstices between sites of memory.