'Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape', at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, brings together photographic artwork from the late 1960s to the present day, inspired by the unique and evocative moorland. With its open spaces, ancient woodland and traces of human activity over thousands of years, Dartmoor has long attracted artists, often depicting it as a rural idyll. During the later twentieth century, artists began to explore new approaches to making, using Dartmoor as a space for experimentation.

Dartmoor exists in the cultural imagination as a place of freedom and wilderness, but it is also a contested landscape and a microcosm of urgent issues facing Britain today. Concerns about the interconnected ecological crisis and climate breakdown, as well as who has access to the land, are explored by artists in this exhibition through collaborations with climate scientists, protestors and other experts. The range of visually stunning and emotionally charged artworks offers new ways of appreciating and understanding Dartmoor's special landscape and considering its future.

In the late 1960s, many artists in the UK and US left the studio to go into the landscape, creating radical new forms of art that came to be known as 'Land Art'. This approach to making included a range of practices, including sculpture and performance, nearly always recorded and shared through photography. Artists designated walks and ephemeral objects placed in the landscape as art. Landscape became subject, studio and inspiration.

Innovative American artist Nancy Holt, influential British artist Richard Long and experimental feminist artist Marie Yates shared a similar attitude to making art. They used photography as both a means of documentation and a trace of their journey through the landscape.

Richard Long's early Dartmoor walks are emblematic of this new art. The same year that Robert Smithson, with Nancy Holt, hired earthmovers to create Spiral Jetty on the salt flats of Utah, Long was walking 'as art' across Dartmoor. Despite his resistance to any artistic categorisation, Long has been described as a Land Artist ever since and has risen to international prominence, making work on Dartmoor throughout his long and prestigious career.

Against the backdrop of the ecological crisis and climate breakdown, RAMM commissioned ecologically conscious contemporary artists Ashish Ghadiali and Alex Hartley to make work for this exhibition. Their separate research into the museum's collections of historic Dartmoor photography and archaeological artefacts have prompted distinct and unique artistic explorations of Dartmoor's deep time and ecology.

Both based in Devon, concern for the earth and our interconnected relationship with the natural world guides their thinking and approach to making. The new sculptural installation by Alex Hartley 7 Summoning Stones – made from seven recycled solar photo-voltaic panels and inkjet prints alongside granite boulders with extruding solar thermal tubes – has been realised through his research at the museum and in its stores where he searched for what he describes as 'a resonant magic object'. Hartley found that RAMM's Kingsteignton figure, a 2,000-year-old wooden human figure on display on the ground floor, contained the same 'vibrant energy' that he detected in Dartmoor's stone circles. He invites you to stand at the centre of his installation, 'to basically be plugged into the main frame'. He says 'I want the energy of these rocks to transfer into the viewer'.

Wooden figure found in Kingsteignton, 426–352 BC

Ashish Ghadiali's two-channel video Can you tell the time of a running river? from his ongoing series 'Cinematics of Gaia and Magic' has been informed by working with the climate scientist Tim Lenton, a conversation with the Gaia theorist James Lovelock in the final year of his life and an engagement with deep time. Ghadiali's installation explores how we might find what he refers to as, 'new ways of living on the earth, through the recognition of "different temporalities": here, the time of a river and the time of a human body'.

With growing awareness about the toxicity of photographic chemistry and the medium's reliance on extractive processes, artists are now exploring more sustainable photographic practices and ecosystems. Jo Bradford has developed a plant-based seal for her prints that incorporates locally produced beeswax and is nurturing willow trees to sustainably manage waste from her Dartmoor studio.

Not all photography requires a camera. Garry Fabian Miller and Susan Derges have experimented with camera-less techniques, extending the creative possibilities of the medium as a means to express their engagement with the landscape. Derges has often worked outside, using the Dartmoor landscape at night as both studio and darkroom, while Fabian Miller developed darkroom techniques to create semi-abstract images that express his experience of living and walking on the moor.

For artists with such international influence and reach, it is surprising that many spend most of their time on Dartmoor. Garry Fabian Miller rarely leaves the eight-mile radius from his home, an area he calls 'Crucible', where he finds inspiration.

These artists have a deep and continuing creative connection to this rural place. Their approaches to making and subject matter convey an openness, even within the specifics of the place, giving the work wide appeal. Works stand in for universal themes: Robert Darch's images of the Ten Tors Challenge describe a rite of passage for young people.

Fern Leigh Albert's commitment to engaging with and documenting the wild camping protests have made visible both the campaign and aspects of Dartmoor's cultural life right across the world through international news outlets.

Home is, as the old adage rightly identifies, 'where the heart is' and this seems never more so than when people find a connection with Dartmoor's stone rows and wide, open spaces. You do not need to live on Dartmoor to feel 'at home' there. Come and find out for yourself in an events programme which includes walks on Dartmoor.

Lara Goodband, Contemporary Art Curator & Programmer at RAMM, Exeter City Council

'Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape' is showing at the RAMM from 19th October 2024 to 23rd February 2025. There is an extensive events programme of talks and workshops alongside the exhibition

'Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape' is part of the Contemporary Art Programme funded by Arts Council, England at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter. It is curated by Lara Goodband, Contemporary Art Curator at RAMM, with Kate Best as consultant curator. Dartmoor Preservation Association is a lead partner for the exhibition

Artworks

Eden 6 2004
Susan Derges (b.1955)
The Darkroom's Fading Presence 2020
Garry Fabian Miller (b.1957)

'Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape' at RAMM, Exeter

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