Led by ramblers and young communists, it eventually resulted in the establishment of national parks in the UK. Pih says he “wanted to explore why we have such an emotional attachment to land and why we protest when we see it being threatened”, and while the show nods to the history of the enclosures and Highland Clearances in Scotland, its real historical and political starting point is the rambling and then trespass movements of the early part of the last century, which culminated with the mass Kinder Scout trespass of 1932 in the Peak District. There’s an examination of the resource-efficient lives of the Romany community, and Peter Kennard’s Haywain with Cruise Missiles montage. Claude Cahun’s surreal photograph of a pair of arms emerging from a stone monolith sits near catalogues from the Festival of Britain. Constable’s much confected depiction of Flatford Mill is to be found alongside banners made at the 1980s Greenham Common peace camp. The upshot is pleasingly surprising and diverse. This wide brief is fulfilled by a suitably eclectic collection of more than 150 pieces of work, largely and imaginatively gathered from the Tate’s collection and augmented with some astute loans and commissions. The links between access to land and class, race, gender and disability are likewise probed in a specific context of activism and protest. Photograph: © Courtesy of Jersey Heritage CollectionsĪs the exhibition developed, and after several Covid-related delays, it has moved to examine our relationship with land through the lenses of the pandemic, the climate emergency and nuclear threat, as well as more mystical and emotional bonds to the rural landscape. Surreal stone … Claude Cahun’s Je Tends les Bras (1931). Curator Darren Pih was interested in notions of thresholds and borders, as well as the reality of large areas of the UK being off limits to most people for a multitude of reasons, ranging from private ownership – including by offshore trusts – to militarisation and discrimination.

This spirit of questioning the ownership, use of and access to land animates a show that was initially conceived at the height of Brexit debates about identity, belonging and “taking back control”. As Berger points out, the painting was made at a time when a man who stole a potato risked a public whipping and the sentence for poaching was deportation. Stonehenge is the UK’s most contemporary structure: there’s a new story about it every week Jeremy DellerĮssentially, Berger’s argument was that rather than reading the painting as a simple marriage celebration with the accompanying corn field symbolising fertility and so on, this was a bald celebration of property and private land, and a statement about who had access to it and who didn’t.

Landscape art