Helen Chadwick, Susan Hiller, Ian McKeever and Boyd Webb
Lifelines presents the work of four artists now establishing international reputations. Each artist is concerned primarily to make powerful images, but each is also suggesting a way of viewing – or imagining – the world at the start of the 1990s.
'Nature' has been used throughout history as a metaphor for human aspirations, starting with the fall from the Garden of Eden. Even the current ecological movement has a metaphorical dimension. The history of the landscape genre in art mirrors the development of changing views of 'human nature'.
Today, conventional ideas about 'nature' and about the identity of the self are both being strongly challenged. The discovery of a new identity for ourselves and a new perception of our surroundings may be a matter of survival.
The art in Lifelines parallels these debates in a poetic way. Ian McKeever and Boyd Webb suggest how our experience of 'nature' differs from our idea of 'landscape'. Helen Chadwick and Susan Hiller are more directly concerned with 'human nature' and the relation between identity and experience. All four artists use photographs or other mechanical reproductions to establish their subject and to develop further the traditional genres of landscape and portraiture.
