Annabel Howland

For the Landscape Trauma exhibition, Annabel Howland, an Amsterdam-based artist, took enlarged photographs of landscapes, both urban and rural and then meticulously cut away at the images, thereby reducing them to almost eerie skeletal forms. Introductory notes to these scalpelled photographs described them as ‘reconfiguration’ which ‘results in works which are both physically and visually fragile’, whilst the artist herself was said to describe her images as ‘teetering on the edge between coherence and collapse, representation and abstraction, identity and psychosis’. In this regard, amongst her most successful pieces were her aerial shots of miles of agricultural landscape. These pieces prompted a questioning of what is present and what is absent from the farmed countryside. By cutting away at the photographs, by slicing away at the body of the image, Howland emphasised and drew attention to the ways in which intensive farming has, almost literally, taken the soul out of the land, leaving it depleted and stark, skeletal and bare.