About
“While my practice is rooted in painting, I work across media making combinations of objects and text and exploring the site specific. My work foregrounds conflicting storylines within the spatial environment, aiming to capture the collisions between the values and meanings we bring to our experiences of place, with a particular focus on borders and peripheral places that present a form of ‘Terrain Vague’.”
Chell’s series of paintings The Garden of England drew on the 18th-century English Landscape tradition to investigate the motorway verges of Kent. Tourism, with its roots in early tourist guides by William Gilpin and William Wordsworth, has led to the exploitation and even despoliation of places Wordsworth and others wanted to protect. Chell exhibited these paintings in Little Chef restaurants, arguably the modern equivalent of the network of 18th-Century watering holes that catered for the Grand Tour, with a view to prompting questions about the relationship between our experience of landscape and the ways in which we travel through it.
Chell was awarded an AHRC Research Fellowship for 2012-2013 for his Soft Estate project that explored landscapes that have both been made accessible and also transformed by car culture. Seemingly urban in character, paradoxically these motorscapes are fragile, yet extremely self-sustaining and hard environments, changing landscapes that embody both beauty and survival.
Chell’s solo exhibition/installation at the Horniman Museum and Gardens further explored the nature of borders but this time spotlighting the diverse narratives surrounding natural history and ecology, bringing into question the values and responses that emerge when we make and look at images of plants. Chell’s essay in the accompanying publication alludes to thelayered narratives of plant collecting and how this was symptomatic of a much larger cultural framework of commodity exchange, Cabinets of Curiosity and the formation of museums alongside the display of wealth and the ecological fallout of such collecting ,a theme that was further explored with Phytopia an exhibition tour which finally showed at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.
Chell’s most recent solo exhibition at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London (2019) developed the theme combining both floor and wall-based works reflecting the visual nomenclature of blue and white porcelain conflating the precious or revered with the overlooked and discarded, questioning how our ideas about taste are inherited. The works explored themes of consumption and waste through the aesthetic elevation of ordinary objects and industrial landscapes such as weeds, transportation, pallets and spoil heaps.
Publications accompany Soft Estate, Eclipse, Bloom and Phytopia. These books form a key part of his practice. They aim to open up a dialogue with and around each exhibition and combine elements of exhibition catalogue, academic publication and artist’s book.
Edward Chell is Reader in Fine Art at University for the Creative Arts. He is represented by Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf, Germany.