Field Notes: Painting the Anthropocene

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Katharine Le Hardy

Slipway, Oil on paper, 80 x 110cm

Field Notes brings together two painters, Paul Smith and Katharine Le Hardy in an exhibition documenting new landscapes to produce a radical vision of what we consider nature in the age of the Anthropocene. In their very different ways, Smith and Le Hardy tear up their source materials of photographic documentary and encounter with landscape to produce a radical vision of habitats under the pressure of human presence. These two painters mediate lost and repurposed human structures entwined with vegetal life. Old plastic piping creeping through allotment grounds, the soft decay of old wooden buildings on the boundaries of cities: through scratch, fleck, flake and drip, Smith and Le Hardy’s works remind us that what we consider ‘nature’ has always been framed through the aesthetic, and that a new discourse of paint can help us to see the strange luminosity of a world in which the human is an always-tangible presence in the natural world.