This picture, which I saw yesterday at the Lisson Gallery in London, appears to show a mountain landscape. However, it is actually a byproduct of a more ambitious work of landscape art that I saw last November at the Barbican: Lucy Raven's film Murderers Bar (2025). I have written here before about art addressing the environmental impacts of dams; this film does the opposite - celebrating the undamming of the Klamath River in Northern California. At the Barbican I arrived at just the right time to watch drone footage of the wider landscape and workers laying dynamite. Then, the loud detonation arrives making you jump (I stayed to watch it again and managed to film it on my phone - see below). The beauty of the film really becomes apparent as her camera follows the wave of water flooding through miles of the old river valley, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. 'The film then follows the river back upstream through the drained reservoir, a stark terrain of sediment cut by the new path of the river that will be transformed by life in years to come. The original drowned landscape is now revealed as potential'.    

I went to look at this small section of London landscape because I had just read Carol Watts' excellent book of poems about it, Mimic Pond. The cover shows grass poking through the shallow water like lines of verse and in the poem she compares the black crows hovering over winter ice to 'black script' or 'notes on a stave'. Her title comes from Henry David Thoreau's Journal for 16 April 1852 - 'here is a mimic sea - with its gulls' (he was describing the look of a meadow after rain and snow melt). Other writers she draws on, whose work I've mention before on this blog, include Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Francis Ponge, Gary Snyder and Allen Fisher. Her poems cover a year of close observation and at about this time she saw the pond as 'a replication of expanses / on different scales, wondering / what the pond sees in the crow / or the crow, as it flies, sees / in the pond / also in motion.'

I went to an excellent online talk by Carol Watts a couple of years ago, 'Pond weathers and inventories: practices of eco-attention in making poetry', but have unfortunately mislaid the notes I made at the time. If I ever come across them I'll amend this blog post... Instead, I'll direct you to an excellent long review of Mimic Pond by Susie Campbell at Long Poem Magazine. She notes, for example, that its 'language fluctuates through shifting levels of meaning and strange reversals, an active playful thinking about pond in writing', and that the rhythms of the poetry sequence 'communicate a quiet spaciousness.'

'Not the restless, trickster shiftings of the pond itself but more like the wheeling, diurnal rhythms of earth and sky, suggesting perhaps that the restless energies of the pond are held within the bigger rhythms of the universe. We feel in them the earth’s curves and parabolas, a recurring motif throughout the collection. Read aloud, these rhythms create a sense of how the great rise and fall of the universe is mirrored in the restless turbulence of the pond.' 

I recently read this lovely new book about the glacier pictures of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. I've written about these before: the 1949 trip to Grindelwald features in the new Mark Cousins film I wrote about last October (he has an essay in The Glaciers); prior to that, in 2018, I went to see some of the paintings and sketches in an exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings. Here, as a special treat for the geographers amongst you, I am going to highlight the glacial features identified by Peter Nienow in his essay 'Art and Ice Loss: A Glaciologist's look at Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's Glaciers.'

Blue Ice

'Dense, clean glacier light absorbs the long (red) wavelengths of light while at the same time scattering the the short wave blue-light.' You can see this in her most famous glacier painting, the Tate's Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald (1950). Nienow wonders whether Barns-Graham visited one of those tourist glacier tunnels where you can enter and marvel at this blue light. I imagine none of these will be left soon, but we visited the one they have at Titlis in Switzerland back in 2017.  

Moulins and Dolines

Many of her paintings have 'blue circular swirls and holes in the ice, clearly visible in for example Glacier Vortex (1950', the image you can see above. Meltwater ponds develop at the start of summer and then drain away leaving the depressions in ice called dolines. Water flowing down through the glacier creates vertical moulins and Nienow tells us that 'in the Alps, I have plumbed these precipitous pipes.' He mentions the unnervingly large examples they have on the Greenland glacier, which reminded my of the chapter in Robert MacFarlane's Underland where he is let down into one on a rope and balances himself on a spear-like blade of ice before being pulled to safety. 

Crevasses

The much-produced photograph of Barns-Graham and the Brotherton family on holiday in May 1949 climbing the Upper Grindelwald Glacier shows them threading their way upwards joined by a rope, with crevasses visible on either side. The two Brotherton boys look as if they are still wearing their school uniform of shorts and long socks and their father has a tweed jacket on. Crevasses feature in the dramatic paintings of Romantic artists like Thomas Fearnley, but Barns-Graham wasn't interested in panoramic views. She was more concerned with geometry and form, and several of her 1949 glacier studies show patterns of crevasses separating irregular blocks of ice.

Superglacial debris

Her paintings are dominated by greys, blues and white but there are sometimes patches of brown which represent the colours of rock that has fallen onto the surface of the glacier. Nienow reproduces Glacier, Rock Forms (1950 which has 'possible evidence of iron-oxide-stained rock debris' in it. Some of these fallen boulders eventually end up perched on pedestals of ice like natural sculptures, resembling the work of her contemporaries in St. Ives.  

Foliation

Foliation is the process by which fine lines in the ice are created, marking summer periods when dust, pollen and insects collect on the surface of the snow. Once these layers become ice and start moving downhill, they can get folded and fractured, creating patterns that Barns-Graham reproduced in sketches like End of the Glacier, Upper Grindelwald. I'm sure she would have loved the glacier we visited in Iceland, where the ice was covered in black volcanic dust.

Peter Nienow's essay ends on an elegiac note with statistics on glacial retreat in Switzerland. He says they lost 10% of their ice volume between 2021 and 2023. Wow. That is such a short period - it only seems like yesterday I was reporting here on our visit to the Swiss mountains in 2017. Sadly, nobody now can see what Wilhelmina Barns-Graham saw. 'The stunning ice fall that she explored and drew inspiration from as it tumbled down towards the outskirts of Grindelwald village is no more.'

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of this blog and the first people I ever wrote about were Hamish Fulton and Richard Long. Hamish Fulton is still making walks in the landscape - he led one recently as part of a nationwide nature action day. Richard Long is also still very active and celebrated his eightieth birthday this year. His Mud Sun can currently be seen in the refurbished National Gallery, where it is installed 'as a bridge between early paintings and works by High Renaissance artists in the collection.' Meanwhile Tate Modern has an 'Artist Room' devoted to work by Long, including the text piece I photographed above. Tate Modern is celebrating its own anniversary this year - it opened twenty-five years ago with a thematic display that juxtaposed Richard Long and Claude Monet under 'Landscape, Matter, Environment'. This did Long no favours and indeed Adrian Searle called it the curators' 'most glaringly awful moment ... the large, tremblingly beautiful Monet waterlily painting, which for many years hung in the National Gallery, opposite a wall-filling black and white splattery drawing by Richard Long.' However, I remember liking the idea of muddling up different kinds of art in this way. My blog has always jumped around and alighted on anybody that could be classified under the broad headings of 'landscape' and 'culture'.   

That first post I wrote in November 2005 referred to Ubuweb, a site that's been going longer than my blog (I'm pleased to see the link still works). They have a short sound file in which Long can be heard reading his 1988 text work Desert Circle:

Camel dropping to thorn. Thorn to yellow flower. Yellow flower to ant. Ant to white stone. White stone to black stone. Black stone to stick. Stick to goat’s horn. Goat’s horn so seed pod. Seed pod to cricket. Cricket to seed. Seed to orange stone. Orange stone to beetle. Beetle to place of the camel dropping.

The other sound piece I referenced was Hamish Fulton's Seven Days and Seven Nights Camping in a Wood, Cairngorms, Scotland, March 1985. Fulton once said 'numbers are both of significance and no significance', but also 'I am curious about the number seven'.* I could choose lots of other examples from his walks that use the number seven. This one below signifies nothing about the Japanese landscape but does remind me of the way words fall like rain in visual poetry - Apollinaire's 'Il Pleut' (1914), Ian Hamilton Finlay's 'Pleut' (1963) or Derek Beaulieu's 'Il Pleut' (2024), a booklet I purchased earlier this month at the latest Small Publisher's Fair. The repetition of one word like this was also used in some notable concrete poems - Pedro Xisto's' 'Rock' (1964), Finlay's 'Star' (1966) - although each of these introduced one further term that gave the poems their meaning. Fulton's text differs from these forms of visual poem in remaining, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, 'the cry of its occasion'. I also think the walk's Japanese location provides the words with a specific resonance. The repetition of 'RAIN' gives a calming, meditative quality, like the regular sound of a water clock in a Zen garden. And the absence of anything but rain recalls the mists and empty spaces of Japanese art.  

*This was in a book to accompany a 1995 show in Munich, Thirty One Horizons. The text was reproduced in Phaidon's big survey of Land and Environmental Art, edited by Jeffrey Kastner, but they unfortunately misprinted the title as Thirty One Horrors, opening up the amusing possibility of an alternative folk horror version of Fulton's walking artist career.

I was curious to see the White Cube's Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition but conflicted after the recent controversy surrounding his firework performance in the Himalayas, The Rising Dragon, sponsored by an outdoor clothing company called Arc’teryx. According to Artnet, Cai thought he was bringing "energy, awe, blessings and hope to the world,” but there was a swift backlash over a work 'threatening one of the planet’s most fragile ecosystems and for showing cultural insensitivity, as the Tibetan plateau and its mountains are sacred in Tibetan Buddhism.' It sounds like the worst possible kind of art-in-the-landscape. Two days after the fireworks Cai and Arc'teryx were issuing apologies and explanations. Cai said his fireworks were biodegradable and had passed environmental standards when used for the Beijing Olympics, but scientists 'warned that the damage could be irreversible, given the plateau’s fragile ecosystem' and 'pointed out that standards designed for urban settings do not apply at such high altitudes.' An official investigation was launched. Artnet point out that Cai got into more trouble recently for a drone performance in Quanzhou which 'ended in chaos when drones, unregistered with local authorities, were shot down en masse during the event', and four months earlier an event in Los Angeles caused ash to rain down on spectators and unexpected noise disruption for surrounding neighborhoods. 

Aware of all this I nevertheless decided to have a look at the gunpowder canvases on display at White Cube, where flower and bird forms emerge from attractive and colourful abstract swirls to create 'cosmic gardens'. The curators wax lyrical: 'amber collides with ash-grey in fevered bursts; diffusions of cerulean are flecked with inky lapis; whirlpools of fuchsia and blue converge and dissolve.' The example above is much less colourful; Mountain (2019) was 'conceived in response to Cézanne yet reframed within a broader horizon that unsettles the paradigm of Eastern and Western art histories, advancing instead a vision of heritage as shared experience.' I'm not sure how far it achieves this, but it's true that it resembles both Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire and the misty contours of a Chinese landscape painting. Cézanne was actually the source for Cai’s controversial fireworks in Tibet, via an early unrealised project for a firework display over Mont Sainte-Victoire, Ascending Dragon: Project for Extraterrestrials No 2 (1989). According to Artnet, 'Cai had originally sought to realize the piece both at Mount Fuji, in Japan, and at Mont Sainte-Victoire in France, but was reportedly denied permission by local authorities due to environmental concerns.'

Tatiana Trouvé, Le voyage vertical, 2022 from the series Les dessouvenirs

The Pinault Collection is currently hosting a major retrospective of art by Tatiana Trouvé at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, which I got to see earlier this month. It includes work from the series Les dessouvenus (2013–ongoing) in which 'the Paris-based artist first douses large sheets of coloured paper into bleach before drawing ‘environmental dramas’ atop the stained surface in pencil. Similarly, The Great Atlas of Disorientation (2019) echoes the surreal bleached effects of the previous series, this time rendered in watercolour, recalling mushroom clouds in one work, or smoke and halos in another' (Frieze). These are dream landscapes which blur the distinction between interior spaces and exterior views, like confused memories. However the trees, forests, mountains and quarries also have an 'ominous atmosphere', to quote the Venice curators, suggesting 'a planet progressively destroyed by human action.'

Tatiana Trouvé, The Border, 2019 from the series The Great Atlas of Disorientation

These are not the only ways in which landscape enters Trouvé's work. She is very influenced by writers who I have talked about on this blog before and has made marble sculptures of their books: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. I'll note here three more examples of the ways in which landscapes can be seen in her work.

• 'Walking on streets, forest paths, or by the sea, Tatiana Trouvé picked up objects and had casts made of these relics in bronze, brass, steel, and aluminium, then painted them. Each necklace bears the name of the place of the finding and the time Trouvé was there.' These sculptures derived from walks in the landscape relate to various places in Europe, but I was interested to see one that she made at that epicentre of contemporary post-industrial nature writing, landscape and sound art in Britain: Orford Ness.

• Two plaster casts resembling relief maps in the exhibition space 'originated in impressions that Tatiana Trouvé took on the streets of Montreuil in the aftermath of the riots provoked by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year boy of North African descent in June 2023. The molds made from the rests of the riots-burnt garbage bins, melted plastics and scorched shopfronts-transform into an abstracted landscape that registers the volcanic rage of the disenfranchised and maps the turbulence of the present.'

• Another work can be connected to the city that is hosting this exhibition. Trouvé turned an irregular metal form resulting from an accident in a foundry into 'a sculptural terra incognita, a territory or perhaps a volcanic landscape waiting to be discovered. On a sheet of aluminum card are engraved the feminine names of fifty-five imaginary cities from Italo Calvino's novel Invisible cities.' In Calvino's story 'it transpires that all the places Marco Polo describes are aspects of one city: Venice', and 'just like Calvino, Trouvé explores the porous boundaries of memory and imagination.'