Visionary Landscapes

Visionary Landscapes is a new exhibition at Swedenborg House exploring the relationship between landscape, imagination and vision. Curated by Museum Director Stephen McNeilly, the exhibition brings together historic works in dialogue with contemporary paintings, photography and film.

Organised, in part, to showcase the recent acquisition of works by William Blake and Francis Oliver Finch into the Swedenborg Collection, the exhibition draws together key works from a broad range of contemporary and historical artists including Surrealist painter Malcolm de Chazal; occultist Austin Osman Spare; filmmaker Andrew Kötting; musician Jem Finer; photographer Jason Orton; psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, and writer Alice Albinia, amongst others.

Drawing on questions of representation, symbolism, memory, environment and place, the exhibition invites us to re-evaluate landscape as a constructed and internal state and asks us to view nature as a threshold between visible and invisible realms.

‘According to Swedenborg, the inner landscape of consciousness has its own laws’, says the curator Stephen McNeilly, ‘and these laws mirror the laws of nature and give form to the cosmos. For artists such as William Blake, F O Finch, De Chazal and many others, there is a perfect alignment or correspondence between the two.’

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of public events and screenings as well as a book launch.

Image Credit: William Blake, 'Thenot remonstrates with Colinet…' or 'Thine ewes will wander…' One of seventeen illustrations by Blake for The Pastorals of Virgil (1821), published by Dr. R J Thornton.