The exhibition takes its title from a prehistoric stone monument in North Yorkshire which was destroyed during the construction of RAF Menwith Hill during the late 1950s. This site and its surrounds have preoccupied Andrew Black for the last five years, forming a diverse body of moving image work and culminating in his Margaret Tait Award Commission, On Clogger Lane (2023).
On Clogger Lane traces the transformation of the Washburn Valley from the bronze age to the present day, considering both political and topographic changes. Within the film, Tibby Bilton speaks to the redrawing of landscape across time and the overwriting of history, themes that also permeate Black’s two-dimensional work. The film’s concern with delving into layers of the past finds a correlative in the structure of this presentation, which incorporates paintings produced over the last 15 years, often in tandem or alongside Black’s moving image practice.
Black trained in painting and this influence remains in his films which feature tightly composed still shots of landscape, overwriting in his own hand and drawings by himself and others. The 2019 film Eternity Knocker recorded various forms of marking – printmaking, mining, writing, farming – to produce a portrait of a place. Work by Yorkshire artist Marie Hartley functioned as a key narrative driver. In turn, photographic and filmic imagery often becomes the basis of Black’s paintings
In works on display here, photographic information is used variously to enact a shift between extreme distance and close detail. There is a continual cinematic movement, a zooming in, out and back again.
Tibby Bilton (2022) was produced while Black was working on the films The Naked Man (2021) and On Clogger Lane. In the painting, RAF Menwith Hill’s radomes are viewed from above, appearing shadowed in morning or evening light. The American base is the largest electrical monitoring station in the world. Under Black’s handling, its scattered spheres come to resemble a place of religious rites – a stone circle or another neolithic arrangement. He draws comparisons across time, between forms of transmission, belief and celestial concern. Circular forms emerge in Tree of Life (2022), a wax rubbing of an ancient petroglyph near RAF Menwith Hill, affixed with badges from peace actions at the base, largely undertaken by women.
In High Bents (2018) Black’s style blends topographical survey with painterly concerns for colour and composition. Like many of the other gouaches in this exhibition, it was painted in a grid, one square at a time, with no single area privileged over another. It depicts a set of derelict 19th century miners’ cottages, one of which gives its title to the painting. A threatening black band buzzes in the middle distance of the work. The backlit houses are deprived of features and somewhat haunted, underscoring the loss of a particular vernacular lifestyle.
While concerned with distance, aerial views are saturated, pockmarked and bodily; their scale is ambiguous. Hole (2013) could be a wound, an orifice, the entrance to a mine, or a section of moorland. In Blood (2009), a cropped text is visible in an image that seems to be in an ongoing process of decay.
Figurative works show bodies under forms of duress, either surveilled, momentarily captured or damaged. Like a film still, Martin injects penicillin (2011) portrays the intimate moment where a lamb’s skin is pierced. Cumulatively, unidealised instances of agricultural labour like this affect the construction and delineation of land. The piece documents something normally hidden. Such capture is furthered in the gouache Justin Bieber (2018). The salacious source image of the nude celebrity’s body was taken using a zoom lens. At times the details begin to fracture and break apart. Where information falls away, Black marks the flesh, tracing its contours.
We come closer to the body in Solar Anus Tattoo (2016), a piece of tissue pasted over rough white wallpaper. The stains on the tissue came from dabbing at blood and ink while making a stick-and-poke tattoo. The fluids form an ambiguous image that is both corporeal and terrestrial: white radome or prehistoric glyph, a cut or wound, cavity or pore.
