I know I’m not really giving anyone enough notice, but if you are in the
Southampton area this weekend or next you must go down to the City Art Gallery
to catch Kurt Jackson’s wonderful ‘Place’ exhibition before it packs up and
heads to the West Country for a long stint in Truro and then onto Bath in
October.
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| Kurt Jackson, Walker on the Broomway, rain coming in, wind picking up. Low water September 2013 |
The last Jackson exhibition I saw was The Thames Revisited where Jackson
followed the path of the River Thames, and the progression of landscapes it
moves through. This exhibition finds him travelling all over the country
visiting the favourite locales of selected guests. These include writers,
poets, musicians, environmentalists and friends. Each of the guests has written
describing their feelings about the places, the texts placed alongside Jackson’s
creations.
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| Kurt Jackson, Femi Kuti on the Pyramid stage, Glastonbury 2010 |
The display ranges from tiny playing-card sized paintings through to his
enormous canvases. There are beautiful cast sculptures, a wire and junk mesh
(from Glastonbury), beach-combed shells and bones from the Scottish coast. My
favourite piece called Erme, Dusk was
a small collection of driftwood with a painted coastal scene, complete with
found pebbles, a bleached stick and a plastic fork. At the other end of the scale,
his huge paintings of the Broomway on the Essex coast really conveyed the
enormity of the Essex coastal mudflats and sky. But I liked almost everything
in this exciting show.
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| Kurt Jackson, This place. Photogravure and drypoint |
There is a very nice book to accompany the show that is now my bedtime reading, however the work really deserves to be seen in the flesh to appreciate the physicality of the paint
