A Land of Incomparable Beauty

Hadas Auerbach, Matthew Clifton, BLOAT Collective, Frances Drayson, Allan Gardner, Jonathan Kelly, Hannah Lees, James Lincoln, Luisa Mè, Irvin Pascal, Jesse Pollock, Beth Emily Richards, Giorgio Sadotti

Co-organised with Alia Hamaoui & Byzantia Harlow

11 July — 22 August 2020
Collective Ending HQ, London

Merrie Old England: a history of the enclosures, of 17th century levellerism and of kids sniffing glue in a poor seasidevillage. National pride slides into fascism and rural bliss passes into nostalgia. Yet magic and mystery remain. A Land of Incomparable Beauty presented the sinister and eldritch underbelly, the skull beneath the skin of the countryside. A “Pastoralbeat of the blood”, as Dylan Marlais Thomas once wrote, irreducible to utopian navel-gazing or macabre folk horror, it is a land consumed by belonging and alienation, psychic and political struggle. “In England's green and pleasant Land,” how rich and full of plenty it all seems.

︎︎︎Press Release
︎︎︎Press, ‘A Land of Incomparable Beauty — Review by Adam Heardman’ in Art Monthly (September 2020)
︎︎︎Press, ‘A Land of Incomparable Beauty — Review by Stella Botes’ in Delphian Magazine (online, 2020)