SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL written by Billie Muraben

The nature of the countryside is often flattened out to serve the purposes and ideas of artists, writers, and designers. In some cases people will bend with the natural world, but often pastoral scenes are romanticised, bastardised, or manipulated to fit convenient narratives.

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau encouraged people to strive for simplicity, to “live deliberately” in the woods, but his dogmatic view was matched with incredibly low stakes. Thoreau’s spartan cabin was built on land owned by a friend, just a short walk from the town where he had lived, and his mother brought him food every week — unlike the farmers who he deemed “respectable and interesting... in proportion as they are poor”. William Morris loathed the Industrial Revolution, and sought social reforms and a return to craft for the masses, but his work remained largely in the realm of the bourgeoise, limited by seeking definitive ideals and not allowing for complexities and contradictions. The ‘pastoral style’ suggests harmony with nature, often glorifying both the purity of rural life and the impact people have on the landscape. Paintings of country scenes depict ‘noble peasants’ and flocks of sheep, hedges grown to delineate between pieces of land, and industrialised cattle. The beauty of nature reined in to serve the grand narratives of the people shaping it.

In Pilgrims End, Katy Brett, Tom Bull, and Carsten in der Elst, show works that break from this tradition; working with and responding to land, material, and lore in ways that push against or play with pastoral style. Katy Brett’s Lochcarron typeface, which forms the title of the exhibition, is drawn from shapes found in the rock pools of Loch Carron in the Scottish Highlands. Her Unearthed chair is an adaptation of the Orkney chair, which are made by shepherds using found materials, designed to protect them from smoke, draughts, or harsh weather conditions. Brett’s version was designed through a process of ‘Anthropocene Crofting’, which integrates digital fabrication with analogue practice to produce furniture and objects reflective of the post-industrial age. The chair can be flat-packed and put back together without tools, adapting to shepherding practices and environments around the world.

Tom Bull’s stoves, bird-feeders and playhouses — which read as shrunken aspirational ‘dream homes’ — are coated in bitumen, a sticky oil used in construction, as if they are being preserved. Having grown up in rural Northamptonshire, Bull pushes against both the city-centric “horror” around the countryside and the glorification of country life. The humour in his work establishes a strange balance between recognition and unease, with traditional log burners made from cardboard, expanding foam and bitumen offering a sense of comfort when on being lit they would burst into flames.

Built up almost like a dry stone wall, or directional stacks pointing walkers in particular directions, Carsten in der Elst’s Graywacke Offcut series is made of jagged pieces of stone discarded in the process of building pavements. Working at a limestone quarry, or at the workshops of material suppliers in Germany, in der Elst follows the lead of the material gestures of each off-cut. As stone is extracted from the quarry to become part of the infrastructure of the city, in der Elst’s process becomes a sort-of middle ground, a negotiation between natural forms and their translation into objects.