Ledger Lines: Abigail Reynolds, Sophy Rickett, Michelle Stuart | Kestle barton | mannacan, Cornwall | 2017

This show brought together three female artists exploring landscape, history and memory in their work. The three distinct bodies of work included triangulated three notable West Country sites – Avebury and the Ridgeway, the River Severn and the Penwith Peninsula – all rich with cultural and historical significance. Using seemingly objective strategies such as documentary photography and found text, the artists explore these sites and their meanings, drawing inspiration from disciplines such as archaeology, geology and geography, but fusing them with the intimate and poetic. The works thus suggest both intensely personal readings of place and history - whether through the delicate earth rubbings of Michelle Start’s Avebury works or Sophy Rickett’s correspondence with a stranger she met on the banks of the Severn - but also contrast subjective and objective modes of understanding place. They reinforce a reading of ‘landscape’ as a construction that combines a physical place with human relationships.