Passing Strange: British Land Art Through Time

This exhibition showcases the exceptionally rich collection of British land art in the Leeds Sculpture Collections.

Featuring work by Tacita Dean (b.1965), Anya Gallaccio (b.1963), Andy Goldsworthy (b.1956), John Hilliard (b.1945) and David Nash (b.1945), it considers how process, transition and duration are used by these artists to defamiliarise landscape and natural forms. The exhibition takes its title from Desdemona’s response to Othello’s tales of adventure through extraordinary landscapes in Shakespeare’s Othello.

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

Other works will 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.

Collectively these artists present an alternative vision of land art than that associated with American artists such as Smithson and Michael Heizer. Embracing transience and rebirth, the work on display poses pressing questions about humankind’s strained relationship with the environment in our contemporary moment of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis. By centring process and ephemerality, these works speak against the commercialisation and commodification of the natural world.