Passing Strange: British Land Art Through Time

This exhibition showcases the exceptionally rich collection of artworks associated with ‘British land art’ in the Leeds Sculpture Collections.

Highlighting works by Tacita Dean (b.1965), Anya Gallaccio (b.1963), Andy Goldsworthy (b.1956), John Hilliard (b.1945) and David Nash (b.1945), this display considers how ideas of transition, ephemerality, and anti-monumentality are used by these artists to defamiliarise landscape and natural forms. The exhibition takes its title from Shakespeare’s Othello in which Desdemona describes Othello’s tales of adventure through extraordinary landscapes as ‘strange, passing strange’.

Strangeness and narration are key themes in Tacita Dean’s Trying to Find Spiral Jetty 1997, which presents an audio recording of the artist’s unsuccessful attempt to locate Robert Smithson’s monumental work of land art in an isolated part of Utah. Dean and her travelling companion Gregory Sax frequently consider this experience ‘strange’. Andy Goldsworthy’s leaf sculptures provoke a similar strangeness in their transformation of natural forms into uncanny shapes that invite touch but threaten to crumble.

Other works include John Hilliard’s landscape photography of water in three states of matter, Anya Gallaccio’s transformation of six dozen red roses into a solid block of pastel, and David Nash’s drawings of his ‘planted’ works in which trees grow to form living sculptures.

These artists present an altogether different vision of land art than the one associated with American artists such as Smithson and Michael Heizer. Many of them would refuse the label of ‘land artist’ entirely. Yet by embracing notions of transience and rebirth, the works on display collectively question humankind’s strained relationship with the natural environment in our contemporary moment of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis. By centring process and fleeting moments of conceptual clarity, these works speak against the commercialisation and commodification of the natural world.