We are pleased to present ‘Land of Mortimer’, our second solo exhibition for the artist James Mortimer, with a series of new paintings taking a fantastical journey into an idealised return to nature.
The works in ‘Land of Mortimer’ present a reimagined Garden of Eden where man and beast exist on equal footing. There is a seductive air of uncomplicated freedom, with people living in communion with nature. But in exploring this idyll, James also uncovers the often-ignored implications that such an existence involves. Freed from social constraint, people behave unthinkingly with a blissful lack of self-awareness, and once governed by their basest instincts soon find themselves given over to shameless naked abandon: to foolish acts of wanton violence, sexual impropriety, and long afternoons of listless indolence.
What results is a world whose fauna is both animal and human, all acting at much the same level of consciousness. Frolicking deer range over open plains and hungry baboons eat nesting egrets, while semi-clad woodsmen hack at trees with axes or drown each other in the lakes. Anything man-made – architecture, engineering – is naive in its construction, indicative of a vague concept rather than something meticulously crafted. In contrast, trees and bushes are minutely detailed and peppered with visual innuendo, a kind of Freudian formalism that underpins every aspect of Mortimer’s land.
For all their rude exuberance, the works in ‘Land of Mortimer’ have deep currents running beneath them. By tapping into the carnal aspect of human nature, they echo the moral ambiguities sometimes found in folkloric myth and ritual. It is a timelessness also articulated through James’s buttery use of paint that lends his scenes an anachronistic haze. In exploring the desire for a return to nature and the bucolic idealism that this entails, James touches on a very human truth that has been carried down from the myth of the Garden of Eden onwards: that any desire for innocence is, inevitably, already tainted by the very act of desiring.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
_wpfuuid | 1 | This cookie is used by the WPForms WordPress plugin. The cookie is used to allows the paid version of the plugin to connect entries by the same user and is used for some additional features like the Form Abandonment addon. | |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-non-necessary | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Non Necessary". |
viewed_cookie_policy | 0 | 11 months | The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data. |
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
test_cookie | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by doubleclick.net. The purpose of the cookie is to determine if the users' browser supports cookies. |
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
CONSENT | 0 | 16 years 10 months 14 days 16 hours 18 minutes | No description |
Advertisement cookies help us provide our visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
IDE | 1 | 1 year 24 days | Used by Google DoubleClick and stores information about how the user uses the website and any other advertisement before visiting the website. This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile. |
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | 1 | 5 months 27 days | This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website. |
Analytics cookies help us understand how our visitors interact with the website. It helps us understand the number of visitors, where the visitors are coming from, and the pages they navigate. The cookies collect this data and are reported anonymously.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
YSC | 1 | session | This cookies is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos. |