ST BARBE MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY
New Street
Lymington
SO41 9BH
www.stbarbe-museum.org.uk
An exhibition looking at the unsettling and strange in British landscape art created in response to an article written by Robert Macfarlane in which he identified the eerie as:
‘…that form of fear that is felt first as unease, then as dread, and which is incited by glimpses and tremors rather than outright attack. Horror specialises in confrontation and aggression; the eerie in intimation and aggregation. Its physical consequences tend to be gradual and compound: swarming in the stomach’s pit, the tell-tale prickle of the skin.’
Macfarlane has developed his writings on the subject for an introductory essay in the catalogue which accompanies the exhibition. The English countryside is more usually associated with the pastoral: a place of beauty and peace, but there is also a tradition in art and literature that draws on an innate strangeness and hostility. The exhibition explores artists’ reactions to ancient landscapes and unquiet nature and their use of light, weather and season and the eerie effects of absence and presence to create an uncanny view of the rural world.
A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by Robert Macfarlane, Steve Marshall and Gill Clarke
