Landscapes of Hope

Opening: Friday 26 September, 6pm – 8pm

Landscapes of Hope is a two-person show of works by Rachael Champion and Susie Olczak, curated by Becca Pelly-Fry. Both artists transmit ideas of local hopefulness in the context of the widespread climate challenges we all face, through stories of adaptation. Olczak’s recent research in Latin America considers local rituals and routines of life as the foundations for making engaging stories in extreme environments. Champion’s work addresses the corporeality of the materials we extract, transform and consume, and how these actions affect the physical characteristics of landscapes and ecosystems.

Considering local storytelling, customs and rituals, the exhibition is a visual experiment in responding to landscape, exploring community resilience and adaptability. The exhibition was originally shown in Folkestone in a ‘borderland’ territory, both a coastal location and a frontier town facing Europe, following a research trip to Dungeness (one of the UK’s driest locations). Its second iteration in Gloucester offers a chance to connect with the other side of England (a much wetter part of the country).

The exhibition will celebrate Gloucestershire’s pioneering Arts and Health and Nature on Prescription services and consider the health implications of natural spaces (both green and watery). It asks pertinent questions about how the health benefits of these spaces might change as they become more precarious or extreme. Ideas of tending to a small patch of land or garden as a metaphor for care for the environment arose as a way to consider ideas of hopefulness, climate resilience and adaptation and small ways that everyone can contribute to climate resilience. Being attentive becomes an act of solidarity, of resistance and a method to learn to live with the other (both non-human and human) more harmoniously.

Landscapes of Hope offers ways of navigating the most pertinent and challenging issues of our time. Both artists are interested in overturning ideas of human supremacy, encouraging a return to nature-led intelligence and tending to the pockets of hope that exist within hostile conditions.