Opening reception with the artist, Saturday 5th April, 6-8pm, all welcome.
The paintings emerge from a push pull of the double sidedness of beauty. Just as all creatures possess a shadow, beauty exists beyond the bright and pretty, casting its own shadow. Beauty embodies reality and gazes deeply into darkness, casting pools of light in the deepest caves and the strongest light in the midst of storms. Beauty has often been coupled with the sublime; something overpowering and awe inspiring, influencing Romanticism and Turner’s brush. The emotional connection to the natural landscape is something eternally human and a mirror between our perception and the real world. The interpretation of reality are adjectives, words to connect ourselves to each other, and always to return to ourselves. Beauty, an adjective projected into the world, influences the paintings in light, shadow and colour. Playing with painting’s reputation as decorative, the subject lingers unseen beneath the surface.
The landscapes I have chosen for this series are the modern suburbia of past hidden cities in the US, unmapped to build the first nuclear weapons. The idea of the ‘Manhattan project’ was to create a nuclear weapon to end the second world war. Those who came into the secret cities were sworn to secrecy and given only enough information to complete their tasks but not to understand the entirety of the project. The two main areas were ‘Oak ridge’ and ‘Los Alamos’. Beginning as makeshift spaces in the middle of the desert and miles from anywhere, the spaces grew into functioning towns. Once the war had ended, rather than dismantling the towns, some made the decision to remain. As time progressed, the cities emerged and everyday life found form in suburbia, town centres, schools and streets. The misguided notion of creating a weapon so big that it was able to overpower all other weapons has haunted the political and real landscape ever since. The destruction suffered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki was immeasurable and continues to impact the area and the global atmosphere.
Although most historical events are recorded in text, discussed vocally and remembered culturally, traumatic events and impacts become forgotten or misshapen in the folding of time. As light shines gently through a leafy suburb, the history of the space is lost in daydreams, quotidian life and normality. Dappled light, bird song, the murmur of a lawn mower; a scene of familiar western life playing out through each day.
The paintings explore the everyday scenes of suburbia. The images I work with come from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. The compositions are spliced from parts of each, cannibalised together, creating a new imagined, fictionalised narrative. As the history we are told and the reality of the past fragment, become stories, shaped and formed according to those telling it, reality becomes what is interpreted, rather than what happened in fact. It becomes what is chosen to be believed or how it is chosen to be told. The reality of the political history that surrounds Japan and the US from 1943 to August 1945 is somewhat muddy.
The impact on the individuals and the landscape in Nagasaki and Hiroshima permeates subsequent generations. The manifestation of war, horrific and devastating, mirrors the darkest corners of the human condition we all share. War is messy, just as an act of defiance in defence of an attack can be quickly twisted into an act of terrorism, it becomes difficult to understand who is at fault in the end. Only trauma remains, sometimes visibly, and with time, the landscape grows over it. Visually one thing is perceived while the secrets are buried beneath. The surface layer, like painting, is the first image. Visually, silence is everywhere. The landscape does not offer its deepest secrets easily. The folds of time lazily cover over the volume of war and trauma. Bodies disappear, chemicals silently trickly through the organic system of flora and fauna. In the silence is healing, it is non-negotiable, we are not part of the conversation, we are not invited to this table, the earth will move within the silence, moving blindly, she does not need permission, she will not request it.
On a macro scale in society, culture and the earth, as on a micro scale within the individual, trauma does not remain visible, if it was ever visible to begin with. Trauma may be created and formed in sound, in real time, and the silence that follows cannot remember the precision of the events. The ground swallows the pits and crevice’s, the chemicals and destruction, and visually transforms the landscape. The narrative of the trauma becomes misshapen through the sound and text of different voices until forgetting shrouds the event and dissonance remains. It is in the forgetting where the painting begins. The painting plays on the sugary reputation it has with the decorative and leans into it. The painting borrows from the visual development of forgetting in the landscape.
The familiarity and beauty of light; sunrise, dawn, dusk, night or midday sets a stage of colour and wonder. Each landscape is a fiction, spliced from spaces found through google maps in current day Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Each painting may be a combination of two or more landscapes and occasionally borrows mainly from a single space. The viewer is blinded as to where and which. Only the colours remain. These landscapes which have grown over the past, have been re-appropriated and reformed in deliberate measures as if the people too, are keen to wash it away, or just make their own.
Charlotte Brisland, 2025
