Landscape of the Future

Having worked for many years as a contemporary art curator before retraining as a garden and floristry designer, I’m always on the look out for stuff that bridges the gap between my past and present careers. The work of artist Wieland Payer does just that; Nature and landscape; its fragility and its malevolence, in and out of our hands, being his core subject.

I first encountered Payer’s work two years ago, when he was graduating from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Printmaking. His work immediately stopped me in my tracks, catching my attention by being incredibly beautiful, while simultaneously tragic and dark. This was 2011 and he’d just completed a series of print works in which the remains of a man-made metropolis are being consumed by Nature.  One such work Temple I, presents a possible future Angkor Wat scenario, where some sort of motorway flyover has fallen into decay and Nature takes hold among the ruins. In another work from this series titled Antenna Forest, radio masts lie felled like redundant technological trees, while another ironically titled New Life depicts a beautiful but terrifying mushroom cloud.

An obvious reference for these works is the kind of post-apocalyptic landscape described in Andrei Tarkovsky‘s 1979 film Stalker. 

However, it’s the connection of this work to the landscape tradition of German Romanticism that I find to be far more poignant. In particular the work of Caspar David Friedrich and the direct correlation in style and allegorical meaning between much of Payer’s work and Friedrich’s 1823-4 painting, oxymoronically titled The Wreck of Hope. 

In this painting, the skeleton of a ship, identifiable as the HMS Griper, is just visible – Griper being one of two ships wrecked during William Edward Parry‘s 1920 and 1924 failed expeditions to the North Pole – hope is quite literally wrecked.  Another work by Friedrich also seems particularly relevant in thinking about Payer’s work. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog painted in 1818, depicts a lone man standing on the precipice of a rock jutting out from a vast ocean. Looking out across the great expanse of water he contemplates his fragility in the face of Nature’s enormity.

While the works from 2011 have an Ozymandias-like foreboding quality to them; warning that all civilisations have the capability to fall apart, Payer’s most recent work takes a different tack. Rather than Nature running wild in amongst the debris of a fallen civilisation, these works instead seem to be suggesting a future in which the natural world is safeguarded from disaster, where it is controlled and kept in check by mankind. In one recent work from 2013 titled Wand II, an Eden project-style glass superstructure is shown as a ceiling to an apparently uninhabited vast and dense forest landscape. Whether or not this his other recent works are intended to present a more positive, optimistic view of the future does little to comfort me – beautiful as it is, this is not a future landscape I would hope for.