Contested Field

Contested Field represents a development in Grose’s work – Living Landscapes – that respects the tradition of landscape art whilst seeking to subvert it. This work evokes the timelessness of memory, exploiting its resonance through unconventional materials.

This installation examines the experience of [Dis]Location through the stories of people who experienced war.

For Flamm in St Petroc’s Soldiers’ Chapel Grose uses craft-based techniques and materials grown on the artist’s holding by the Camel – wool, felting, spinning and natural plant dyes. While her engagement with landscape is as bold as that of artists working in conventional media, by using stuff from the lower ranks of the art world, she introduces novel visual qualities that quietly yet decisively challenge entrenched hierarchies of artistic value.

Two landscapes float above a white clouded floor, representing the birth and death places of a Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry (DCLI) bandsman, born in Bodmin and killed at Armentières. Created from materials grown by the artist in Cornwall, the landscapes evoke those places as they are today.

These are flanked by banners embroidered with phrases from soldiers’ and their families’ writings, showing how war’s dislocation was experienced by those of the rank and file of the DCLI.

These works are emotional responses to directly experienced landscapes, places that have been walked, touched, breathed and worked. Look closely and there is mud and dead plants as well as vista and beauty.

Practicalities: This site is wheelchair accessible,

Contested Field is installed in the Soldiers’ or ‘St Maurice’s’ (patron saint of soldiers) Chapel in St Petroc’s Church – Bodmin’s Anglican Parish Church.  Above the artwork hang former regimental colours from the Duke Of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. The lives and writings of members of the Regiment are referenced in the artwork.

About the Artist

Elizabeth-Jane Grose is a Cornwall-based artist whose work explores our deep-rooted connection with the natural world.  Working from a six-acre smallholding overlooking the Camel Estuary, she creates landscapes and site-specific works that reflect the rhythms of rural life and the enduring relationship between humans, animals, and the land.

For Grose, art is a kind of collecting – a gathering and examining of ideas and feelings. It’s a process of learning centred on a sense of place, the nature within that place and how we as humans affect nature. In both site-specific commissions and recent studio practice, the importance of the natural world (love it or ignore it, wherever we live we depend upon it to eat, drink and breathe), and its fragility in the face of many threats (climate change, erosion, pollution and habitat loss) are underpinning thoughts.

Seeking to contribute no further to the degradation of our environment, Grose works as sustainably as possibly. She grows plants to make natural dyes and keeps a small flock of rare breed sheep for wool, using renewable energy for such processes as require it. She uses those materials, sourced directly from her surroundings, to create large-scale pieces that are both elemental and evocative. Her practice follows seasonal cycles of shearing, planting and harvesting, and invites viewers to experience the landscape as a living, breathing system shaped over millennia.

Previous exhibitions and collections include: the Eden Project Florilegium Archive; Das Urwort Museum at ACC Galerie Weimar; Earthly Delights for Ikon Touring; Royal Society of Marine Artists at the Mall Galleries, London; and public commissions such as Birdsong, Legacy and Lining up the Ducks and Waders for Halton Borough Council’s Wigg Island Visitors Centre, and River of Words for the Environment Agency.

Grose studied Fine Art at Reading University and Goldsmiths College, University of London.