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Consequently, her work sits in a liminal position, both in terms of the philosophy behind it and the work she produced. She researched widely in esoteric and mystic thought, affiliating herself with a number of organisations but ultimately eschewing pre-existing schools of thought for her own, unique philosophy. In some ways she reminds me of William Blake in her approach to both philosophical thought and artistic approach: I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another man’s.

This exhibition does a great job of exploring Colquhoun’s affiliation to and engagement with different schools of thought both artistic and esoteric throughout her life. The earliest paintings we see offer a unique, Modernist take on biblical scenes – Death of the Virgin (1931), Aaron Meeting Moses (1932) and Song of Songs (1933) – all of which ask more questions than they answer, offering not closed, devout religious scenes but instead paintings which seem to be exploring the limits of what is possible and acceptable. In these as in other works, especially Marlowe’s Faust (1930, above) with its double enclosure and presentation as theatre, the theatrical construction of the picture makes it clear that what we are viewing is not a view of how something might have been, but a pictorial essay presenting us with a staged moment in which the viewer is part of an intentional audience. The significance of her theatrical approach is underlined by the inclusion of designs from productions Colquhoun was involved in at Cheltenham School of Art. These early works are Surreal and of their time – oils which have the translucence of watercolour, sparse images with angled planes and a focused absence of realism.

I particularly enjoyed seeing Colquhoun’s uncanny, sexualised flowers and vegetation, with their tension between simplicity and complexity, their florid, unchaste blooming and their languid decay as they begin to drop their petals. After these, her work becomes more abstract, allowing the viewer to intuit the shapes and their meanings. The sections are themed by her many esoteric approaches and each offers an introduction to, for example, the Golden Dawn or Kabbalah. Her range and variety in paintings is fascinating: from womblike, dreamy images, such as Attributes of the Moon (1947), using her own process of decalcomania (in which prints are taken from wet paint) to the excitement of Battle Fury of Cuchullin (1949, below), indicating her Celtic interests, her interests in human life, forms, thoughts and myths are beautifully represented through her abstract works.

It struck me that there are some interesting parallels between her work and that of earlier artist Evelyn de Morgan – not only did they both attend the Slade School of Art, and were both trailblazing, independent women in the art world, they both also shaped their art to their beliefs, both feminist and esoteric. Both were interested in automatic writing and drawing processes, for example, channelling the unconscious, and I noticed there are some similarities of structure and colour as well as theme and form in their works.

My particular interest in Colquhoun’s work is in her mystical depictions of the Cornish landscape, particularly in Lamorna, where she lived. She takes the stone circles, such as the Merry Maidens, as a starting point and constructs her paintings around them, adding fountains of light, connecting lines and other symbols. I love the works where she draws women in the stones – trapped according to the mythology of girls turned to stone.

To unpick Colquhoun’s philosophy is extraordinarily complicated, but there is so much beauty and originality in her work that it’s a rewarding and enjoyable (and occasionally comical) exercise to let the images wash over you, see how they make you feel and what your eye and brain see in them. For me it was an especially pleasurable experience to visit the exhibition on International Women’s Day with friends.

The opening panel points out that landscape painting until the late 18^th century was usually imaginary, or a background, rather than for the sake of landscape itself, and often infused with magic and myth. In fact one thing that struck me is that the magic remains in many of these paintings, whether explicitly with folkloric references, or implicitly in the beautiful, mysterious haze which Turner renders so perfectly. The exhibition begins with Turner’s predecessors, then, such as Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with the Father of Psyche Sacrificing at the Temple of Apollo (1662-3), one of the paintings (and painters) which inspired Turner. The landscape seems to be the focus here, with the buildings and action taking place to the side, as if incidental. (I was also fascinated to read of a ‘Claude Glass’, a small dark convex mirror you could look in to make a landscape look more like a Claude painting!)

The Walton Bridge paintings form an interesting study; the first we see here is Canaletto’s A View of Walton Bridge (1764), a work which particularly celebrates the engineering feat of the bridge itself. A new bridge is in place by the time Turner paints it, twice around 1805, again twice around 1806, 1828 and the 1840s. The paintings are remarkably different, in light and weather as well as in structure and focus. There are people in the paintings, but they seem incidental to the scene itself.

The final Walton Bridge work (above), from the 1840s, is minimalist, the sharp detail and focus of the earlier works sublimated to light; the painting captures a particular moment, foregrounding trees over the bridge and giving a feeling of space and light; the Walton Bridge paintings are a great way of exploring Turner’s engagement with London but also his developing style.

The exhibition looks at paintings of ruins, with their Gothic feeling enhanced by low light, in Dolbadern Castle (c.1800, below), for example, where the tower stands dramatically against the light, rising out of a dark landscape. The myth and magic are definitely creeping in here, and the weather plays its part too with lowering clouds, constructing an image which accords with Edmund Burke’s Sublime. Some works by Henry Bright are included here, a Norwich School painter who accompanied Turner on some of his travels, along with J. S. Cotman. Looking at both these painters, along with Turner, the development of landscape painting in terms of perspective, focus, subject and tone becomes dramatically obvious.

There is so much more to say, but rather than describe the exhibition, I’ll outline what it does: really, it’s all about perspective. Where do we, as viewers, stand? What do we see and what is important to us? These questions are about the paintings but they are also questions about how we view landscape. ‘Turner’s Landscapes’ invites us to consider what we see when we see landscapes: not just a painting, but perhaps a home, something sacred, somewhere full of wildlife, and so on. Part of the exhibition uses a range of works to ask these specific questions: about boundaries, ownership and access to landscape; about belonging and exclusion, about the role of imagination, and about the need to protect our landscapes, too. On the wall is a quotation from Margaret Drabble:

The landscape is a living link between what we were and what we have become.

No landscape painting is ever just a direct representation, of course; it’s always filtered through the artist and their context. It’s important, then, to take time to wander around an exhibition like this and think about what our position is as viewers; we can enjoy the art (and this is really worth visiting for the beauty of the works) but we can also consider these other questions about the natural (or not so natural) environment in which we live. From the beautifully detailed Ruskin and Samuel Palmer works, to Claughton Pellow’s ‘Marsh Marigolds’ (1930, below), which seemed to me infused with joy and a mystic spirituality, there is so much here to love and to ponder.

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Lines’s antiquarian and archaeological work was not only for the purpose of depicting beautiful and interesting places; he was concerned about the effect of industry and urban developments on the ancient monuments, and so his precise drawings provide a way of preserving them for the future.

His large oils combine beauty with accuracy of recording, such as The Roman Steps near Barmouth (below left) and Dent Mill, Yorkshire, 1874 (right), which reviewers at the time saw as recording a vanishing world. Dent Mill was perfectly lit in the gallery so that the light fell on the thick oil paint and gave it an appealing three-dimensional effect.

His architectural drawings, many of them Worcester based, such as those of the Commandery, have a delicacy of line and an ability to evoke the place which is remarkable. If Lines intended to paint in order to bring the places he loved to life in the future, and to paint as a way of preservation, he succeeded.

The star of the show, though, is The British Camp and Herefordshire Beacon, Malvern 1872. From the tiny figures of resting walkers in the foreground, among the bracken, to the beautifully=rendered lines of the hills in the background, it is a painting to get lost in. As an aside, it’s interesting that he didn’t like the younger generation of artists with their new ideas, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, and yet in his meticulous attention to the natural world and his interest in the past, it seems to me that he would have had much in common with them.

I must admit that we went to see the Worcestershire Conquest Hoard, not Lines, but this was well worth the visit. It’s open until the end of June 2025.

Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery has two Emma Sandys (above top centre and left); the top is apparently her last work, and you can see that it is unfinished; the left is considered possibly a self-portrait, although I’m not convinced. There are some beautiful medieval figures in the background only really apparent when you see the paintings in person, and it was a real thrill to me to be able to do so.

In the Study Centre I spent some time looking at documents held on her works – quite an interesting collection in terms of provenance and other people’s research, and I now know of several paintings I hadn’t come across before. But the interesting thing in researching Emma is that there are the titles of paintings in exhibition or sale catalogues, and then there are the paintings I know of, many or even most of which have generic titles (Portrait of a Young Lady, or variations on that theme); and I am trying to match up the images with the titles, which is great fun but quite tricky and extremely speculative. Her paintings feature many historical or literary characters, and she is meticulous in her use of accessories and symbolism, so I am tracing these clues. (I’m also obsessed with the jewellery that features in her paintings, but that’s a future research project!)

Emma Sandys’ life was short and, I suspect, quite sad. Born Mary Ann Emma Negus Sandys, she adopted Emma as her first name, and her father, the painter Anthony Sandys, changed the family’s name from Sands in about 1853. At the age of 20 she was baptised, at St Peter Mancroft Church in Norwich, and visiting the church made me feel quite close to her. It is a beautiful, light church, the largest in Norwich other than the cathedral, and although we don’t know why she decided to be baptised as an adult it is lovely to think of her visiting and worshipping in this beautiful building.

The place where she lived, on Grapes Hill, is now a roundabout, sadly, but it is close to Chapelfield Gardens, which was a park in the 1860s and is still open, and there are houses nearby which would have been there in Emma’s time.

Other places of interest included St Andrew’s Hall, where Emma’s work was exhibited during her lifetime, and from which she sold a painting to raise money for the church. The building was scaffolded when I visited, but it is a spectacular place.

It is difficult to find out much more, as so little has been recorded of her life, but we do know that she was a determined woman, who painted other women in the Pre-Raphaelite style with enormous skill and attention to detail. The only indication I have of her own voice is in a few letters, and in one she is clear that she needs space to work:

I want you to write at once and tell me if you will want your studio to do it in, as then Jarrold has another room to let and I’ve asked him to keep it for a week that I may have time to decide about liking it – because if you want yours I must have one, it would be impossible for me to paint at home – so do write and let me know there’s a dear as it is important.

‘Jarrold’ must refer to the family who owned Jarrold’s department store, then a printer and publisher as well. I like the firmness of her tone in this letter, and other letters where she is arranging sales of her work.

Emma Sandys died at the age of 34, after a short ‘congestion of the lungs’, according to the death certificate. Her death was registered by an illiterate maid who was with her when she died. Emma is buried at the non-denominational Rosary Cemetery with her parents, although the grave is unmarked as there was no money in the family by then. I visited the cemetery and found it a wonderfully peaceful place, and thanks to the help of the Friends of the cemetery I worked out roughly where she was buried, and was pleased to see a small patch of snowdrops there. It seemed a calm space for Emma Sandys to rest.

The play opens with the committal of Hamlet’s father’s body to the sea, and then a red digital message appears telling us ’50 DAYS LATER’, with digital countdown clocks on either side of the stage which appear at different moments. The digital figures are at odds with the Edwardian setting, of course, and yet they acknowledge that the audience knows what is coming, and what time the Titanic sank: the figures remind us of the inevitable march of time towards death, and also underscore that ‘the time is out of joint’. It’s a nice touch that ‘To be or not to be’ is rendered at 0:00.

When the ghost of Hamlet’s father first appears, there is a loud crack and a shudder throughout the set, as if the iceberg is struck by the arrival of the ghost which will set off the inexorable chain of events. Throughout the play there are moments of creaking, a gentle background noise which becomes increasingly threatening as we become more aware of what it portends: the destruction of the ship – and, at the same time, the destruction of the family and court at Elsinore. The stage itself tilts, more and more steeply until actors are rolling off it in the final scenes, making the performance quite a feat, and also indicating instability both of mind and of power. The only thing that jarred slightly for me was the odd echo of Titanic the film when Hamlet, bloodstained and mad, spreads his arms wide as if about to declare himself king of the world…

Then there is the fact that the play is saturated with sea-imagery; particularly metaphorically referring to madness. Gertrude says of Hamlet that he is ‘Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend/ Which is the mightier’, and of course Hamlet refers to ‘a sea of troubles’. Of Ophelia, he says ‘Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia/ And therefore I forbid my tears.’ Little is done, therefore, to tweak the play, although a few judicious excisions make the text work better for the context (such as concluding the play with Horatio’s line ‘Good night, sweet prince’). The characters pursue their various courses with apparent ignorance of the fate of their vessel, which works well since it emphasises the blindness to reality of the characters – and reminds us that Elsinore is doomed; it really is a sinking ship both literally and metaphorically.

The play has a stellar cast; some are well-known for television and film performances as well as theatre, such as Nancy Carroll (a fabulous Gertrude whose increasing disarray and anguish is utterly convincing), Jared Harris as an over-confident and jovially unpleasant Claudius, and Anton Lesser as a dramatic Ghost and Player King. Elliot Levey’s Polonius brought some levity to the evening in a recognisably paternal way. Luke Thallon, in his RSC debut, was brilliantly manic as Hamlet, understating the big speeches so that the audience hang on his words, and somehow controlling the events around him as he lost control himself. Nia Towle’s Ophelia (also an RSC debut) disintegrated beautifully, and the herbs speech was particularly memorable, while Lewis Shepherd as a convincing Laertes was also an RSC newcomer. It’s a long performance but we were rapt, and the young cast members played off the older characters in a reminder that this play is ultimately about the suffering of the young for the sins of the previous generation. In a play about grief, madness and power within a dysfunctional family group, that is completely appropriate.

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Consequently, I have always had a bit of a thing for Frederick Ashton’s ballets, although I have seen very few, in fact (Fille, several times; pieces from A Month in the Country, Tales of Beatrix Potter; not much else). I missed the Royal Ballet’s Ashton triple bill last year, sadly, so I was excited to attend Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Ashton Celebration recently, especially as Birmingham Royal Ballet was formed in 1990 from what was the Sadlers Wells Ballet.

Sir Frederick Ashton (1904-1988) was a prolific choreographer. Starting out as a dancer, he was taught by Leonide Massine and Marie Rambert, and was influenced by Diaghilev’s ballets. He became choreographer for what became the Royal Ballet under Ninette de Valois, and he was choreographing from 1926 until 1985. His influence on British ballet, especially in the Fifties, was considerable; his work epitomises what we think of as the ‘English style’ in ballet, with particular ways of holding the head and arms. Yet there is also enormous lyricism in the movements he creates, expressive of emotion even in the most abstract works – and he is also capable of great comic moments (for example, the famous Clog Dance from Fille).

Ashton began his ballet career with a fascination for the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, and for much of his career he worked with Margot Fonteyn, choreographing several works for her. Apparently she later said that she ‘thought Ashton was a madman whose choreography was impossible’!

The Ashton Foundation is currently promoting his ballets through the Ashton Worldwide programme, of which this performance was part (and the evening was also dedicated to Caroline Miller, the late CEO of Birmingham Royal Ballet and herself a great innovator). You can see more of Ashton’s ballets online here. His versatility is extraordinary (and he certainly required it from his dancers, too).

The programme last night featured the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, and it was a pleasure to see this marvellous orchestra in the spotlight, especially at a time when some ballet companies cannot afford to maintain their orchestras. There were selections from music of ballets for which Ashton choreographed, some with dances, including Birthday Offering, which was perhaps the highlight of the evening for me (and I gather BRB will be performing this in 2026, excitingly). The first half ended with selections from La Fille mal Gardee, including the chickens and the clog dance; the second half included the marvellous, sensuous Rhapsody with music by Rachmaninov. I was, I think, slightly disappointed that Sylvia was not danced, although it was a pleasure to hear the music, with echoes of my childhood tape recorder! And Voices of Spring, the concluding piece, with music by Johann Strauss II and danced delightfully by Miki Mizutani and Max Maslen, was a real Spring tonic: rose petals were scattered across the stage as the dancers seemed to fly around the stage, with Mizutani mostly held aloft so that she seemed to skim across the land awakening the world; appropriate for the time of year, and also, it seemed to me, in a world that seems often dreary and beset with troubles, a lovely antidote to send the audience smiling into the night.

Garner is unusual in the modern world as someone who grew up and continues to live very close to where his ancestors lived and worked. As he points out, ‘My family of craftsmen and labourers have inhabited, worked and served the same small Cheshire hillside since at least 1592, and their lives have been part of its shaping.’ For most of us that continuity feels like something out of a novel, and perhaps it explains the deep sense of the land, its history and folklore, that pervade Garner’s novels (mostly set in and around Alderley Edge). This sense of continuity and belonging is just one of the threads in this book; it is a collection of assorted essays, some given as lectures, and the cryptic title is explained in the introduction, with reference to his grandfather and other family members who were weavers:

Handloom weaving produced snippets of cloth which the weaver kept for his own use. These oddments were known as ‘powsels and thrums’; and Joseph’s and William’s families would have been clad with the bits that skill had brought together to make something whole and new. As with weaving, so with writing.

The book is collected from ‘pieces of thought’, offcuts from his writing life, and this idea of threads, tapestry, weaving provides a beautiful metaphor to consider the strands of ideas that make up not only this book but also Garner’s life and work. His non-fiction prose is straightforward and compelling, even though he talks about some complex ideas in the essays. They are broadly chronological, starting with childhood memories of his granddad, a blacksmith, and the young Garner’s entrance to grammar school, particularly writing fondly of his teachers and of learning Latin and Middle English as well as his athletic skill. There’s ‘First Love’, digressions by mathematics and poems, but it feels to me that the book really gets going once Garner starts to write about his house and the landscape in which it is situated. In ‘Up them fields and what was found there’, he describes his hasty purchase in 1957 of a medieval hall-house, in a bit of a state, and where he still lives and which he clearly loves deeply, along with the people who live nearby. Garner is, it strikes me, a part of the landscape himself. ‘Landscape spoke to me before I knew what it was, but I heard,’ he says.

His descriptions of the land and how its history, echoes and wildness call to him and draw him in feel familiar to me. I don’t have the same long family association with one place, but I feel the landscape of places I know and love in my bones: the brick-and-flint cottages and beech woods of Buckinghamshire; the holloways and oaks and sheltering hills in Worcestershire; the wild granite-bound seascapes of the far west of Cornwall. And so the specificity with which Garner writes of his landscape is thrilling, because it is both specifically there and also everywhere. In later essays in the book he traces myth in landscape and the etymology of place names, using imagination to trace a myth into the landscape around him. I can’t possibly do this justice here, but in the essay ‘By Seven Firs and Goldenstone’ he begins with a local legend, told him by his grandfather, and determines the difference between legend (which people believe(d), and myth or folk tales, which they don’t. Then he takes the startling precision of the journey in the legend of Alderley Edge and traces it, place by place, using Old English to decipher the place names, historical records, and the evidence of his own eyes as he walks the myth into being.

Garner is a man who loves words, and languages, which he uses creatively in all kinds of ways. One essay discusses the ways in which English differs from other languages, pointing out the obvious which had never struck me before: that in English we are wary of repetition, trying to avoid it except for particular effects, and this is because, in English, we can, because the multilingual roots of the language mean we have multiple words for things and thus have an extraordinary choice of words. There are also essays on his association with the Jodrell Bank telescope, and on scientific, philosophical topics, too; on creativity and finding the ‘powsels and thrums’ which one day come together to make a work of fiction. The threads in this tapestry are many and brightly coloured, and the book is one I will return to.

Bunce’s art was heavily influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism, and several of her works respond to poetry, including by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There is relatively little serious study on her work, which is disappointing since she was a significant figure in the history of Birmingham’s Arts and Crafts movement, and Musica is frequently reproduced. You can find out more about her work here.

The Bunce archive at Birmingham includes a great deal of material relating to the family, including the library records of Kate and Myra’s library at home; but as far as I can see the main object relating only to Kate Bunce is this recipe book. It’s an old exercise book, with marbled end-papers, and I wonder if she had reused an old notebook: the first page contains a recipe for ‘Spanish Puffs’, then there’s a newspaper cutting with a recipe, and then 20 pages of an essay, handwritten (and possibly not in her writing), ‘On the Endowment of the Irish Roman Catholic Clergy’. Bunce and her family were Anglo-Catholics, and indeed Kate and Myra created works for several local churches, so perhaps this isn’t surprising. After the essay there are many recipes, and half-way through the book it turns upside down, and the recipes starting at the other end of the book are in a slightly different, more archaic hand.

The recipes are mostly handwritten – a few clearly by other people and pasted in, and some with a note such as ‘from Mrs Norton’. They cover a broad spectrum, but overall they are very meaty! Fricasseed pigeon and curried rabbit don’t much appeal to me, I must admit, and there are many dishes such as ‘Roast ham’, ‘Spiced Beef’, ‘Meat pickle’ (the mind boggles), and a lot of oysters, too. I was also struck by how many of the recipes suggested a rather international cuisine – ‘Poulet en Daube’, ‘Croustades de Poulet with white sauce’ (probably the longest and most complex recipe!), ‘Aigrettes de Parmesan’, ‘Quenelles of Veal’, ‘Cassoulettes de Beurre’, and so on. There are soups (‘Giblet soup’, anyone?), puddings (‘Gateau de Pommes with whipped cream’; ‘Pine Apple in Slices’), and many miscellaneous items. Perhaps my favourite of these is marmalade: cherry marmalade, apple marmalade, and at least 6 different recipes for Orange Marmalade. What I particularly love – what makes it feel as though I am close to a real person here – is that the marmalade pages are stained with splashes of juice and sugar (just like my own recipe book).

I don’t know how much help they had at home, but the book does suggest that Bunce did quite a lot of cooking and meal planning. There are other little clues to domestic life there, too: ‘For Cleaning Floors’ offers what we would today think of as a good eco-friendly recipe, and that staple of Victorian sick-rooms (in novels, at least), calves’ foot jelly is there (and sounds no more appealing when you see the recipe). There is also, on a page torn from a daily calendar dated 25th October 1898, ‘Father’s Diet’ (‘No rice, sago, tapioca’) (and in fact her father died the following year, so perhaps this is what the doctor recommended during illness). There are also a number of remedies and recipes for the sick-room, cut out of newspapers and carefully pasted in.

Their diet was certainly varied, though also quite heavy. A further glimpse of the domestic life they led is to be had in the ‘House Book’ in the same archive, which lists neatly dinner party attendees and the menu that was served. From this we can see that other Birmingham artists were invited, including the Gaskins and Florence Camm; Austin Chamberlain and other familiar names also appear. The details of this culinary social life cover the period 1895-1915. One sample menu reads:

Clear soup; fillets of sole; tomatoes on toast; roast mutton; caramel pudding; jelly; Russian biscuits.

So it’s not really a ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ recipe book in any real sense of the word, but it is a wonderful insight into the domestic capabilities of the life of a remarkable woman, who clearly managed a house and social life alongside her artistic work and other social and religious obligations. I leave you with a couple of the recipes, below. The first is somewhat cryptic!

Don Pedro

Using up cold meat and potatoes. Tin with perforated cover (To be obtained Roberts & Co, Summer Row). Cut meat up, pepper and salt, stock if you have it, if not water, 1/2 onion chopped fine. Cold potatoes. Warm them over the fire, 1/2 ounce butter, salt, 2 tablespfl milk. Mix up. Screw top on tin, put potatoes in. Send to table in tin, when potatoes are brown it is cooked.

Welcome Guest Pudding

1/4 cake or biscuits 1/4 bread crumbs 1/2 lb. sug. 1/2 lb. suet/or. peel. 3 eggs rind & juice 1 lemon. Mix the dry ingredients first then 3 eggs also water if wanted. Fill round tin quite full, butter paper put over and steam for 1 1/2 or 2 hours.

One of the contributors to the exhibition, Maria Yates, is quoted early in the exhibition saying that:

My Dartmoor works were very temporary disturbances, hardly there at all, and were attempts to question the uses of landscape in art and the media and the covering over and obliteration of the historical remnants of centuries of human struggle. To me, landscape is a huge memory to be read and valued, and I treasured the finding of small pockets which resonated with shadows of the past.

This sets the tone for what follows: the exhibition offers us ways to consider the three-way relationship between landscape – a specific, wild place with its own histories and ecologies – and art, and people. Many of the works offer images of natural beauty (such as Nancy Holt’s Wistman’s Wood, 1969, which absorbs the viewer into the place with multiple images which seem to create one whole). Others, such as Richard Long’s works, are presented as text, fragments of poetry presented as art, and experienced in a very different way from other more specifically visual works, but capture the same feeling, and I loved LifeDeath and A Dartmoor Walk, both of which invite us into the specific experience of walking Dartmoor. I have encountered Long’s work before, in Tremenheere Line at the Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, so I know that he creates art by walking, working with nature as his medium.

The Summoning Stones (2024) by Alex Hartley is peculiar and compelling. It was commissioned for this exhibition, and Hartley is quoted saying that ‘I want the energy of these rocks to transfer into the viewer.’ The power of the Neolithic stones is apparent in these strange prints, which convey a magnetic field you can see, if not actually feel.

The landscape photographs of James Ravilious have a wild beauty to them, while Susan Derges’ Eden photograms made by ‘submerging photographic beneath the surface of river water and exposing it for a micro-second to a flashlight in night’s darkness’ look unearthly, like the surface of the moon. The metaphor of art literally absorbing, and submerged in, running water is appealing. Jo Bradford’s Cloud Forest (2011) offers multiple perspectives and details and is beautiful; Bradford comments that Dartmoor is, of course, a managed landscape, and nature is managed here, too, shaped into a series of backlit panels. Another work I particularly liked was Gary Fabrian Miller’s Breathing in the Beech Wood, Homeland, Dartmoor, Twenty Four Days of Sunlight (2004), which explores the colour cycle of beech leaves, from their lightest to their darkest as the tree ‘greens’.

The Museum has a large collection of magic lantern slides of Dartmoor, possibly used to provide a virtual tour in less technological times, and there are many standing stones and other features of the landscape here, providing a contrast, with different photographic techniques, yet featuring many of the same places, virtually unchanged. I’m still sifting through the images in my head, thinking about what art tells us about landscape, and vice versa; what landscape means, how we protect and conserve it, and what its value is to us are the questions underlying the whole exhibition.