Boundary Painting

This was part of a project I made for the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. It was part of a solo exhibition in the main festival held there. The plan was to contextualise events but when people found out I was involved, many assumed I would be making history paintings. Speaking as an English artist, history painting was destroyed as so many things were during the First World War. The work of Nash et al demonstrated that all you can make is now painting. Nevertheless I took this assumption as a challenge and tried to find an alternative to history painting. For the body of work, I started by asking what do we actually know? I ended up taking an archeological approach to the landscape in which Magna Carta was sealed, seeking out visible remnants of how it looked at different points in time. This painting shows three things. The most obvious is a modern woodland on a hill. Within that there is a row of oak trees on top of a ridge of dirt which has been dug from a ditch. This is the remaining trace of an old boundary from when the hillside was farmed. It might even be medieval. The most hidden thing of all is that the hillside is heavily terraced, another trace of ancient agriculture and highly likely to have been there in 1215. The painting is in high quality oil paint on board. It is in 16:9 proportions, the same as a modern television, partly because this is rapidly become an invisible set of proportions and partly to make it easy to hang in a modern home. It is in a very basic black tray-style frame which will protect it well in transit but can easily be removed.

Painting:Oil on Wood

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:44 W x 26 H x 1 D in

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