The Boring English Countryside

Artists Katy Woods, Will Cruickshank

24.Feb.07 - 11.Mar.07
during exhibitions or by appt

AUGUST art
2 Baldwin Terrace
London N1 7RU
020 7354 0677
info@augustart.co.uk
www.augustart.co.uk
Tube Old Street, Angel, Shoreditch / Hoxton

Katy Wood’s video “Cornholme” is set in a small town in Yorkshire. Idyllic scenes of fields, sheep, cobblestone cottages and roads drift one into another every 20 seconds or so. It is slow and bucolic. Then one starts to notice there’s no people, save someone closing her drapes. That it is silent except for the background of distant traffic noise -- indeed, it comes almost as a relief when birds start screeching, but that is short-lived as the screeching becomes as suffocating as the silence had been. There’s no activity. It feels lonely and anxious. Surely something will happen? Or maybe – and this might be even more worrying -- maybe nothing will happen?

London-based William Cruickshank was asked to make a public installation in Cornholme. He made mushrooms out of bread which were planted in a field along the high street. They are mushrooms in form and colour but their size and texture give their true nature away to a discerning eye. Certainly a small boy going to school observed to his mother that he thought they were bread? But the mother, head down, seemed to wish that neither the artist nor the bread/mushrooms were there.

The countryside is supposed to be restful, an oasis of calm from the hustle-bustle. So why does “Cornholme” fill us with anxiety? Country folk are supposed to have a friendly word, even for strangers. If so why did the young mother Cruickshank “met” behave rather like another Londoner?