The Living Landscapes are large-scale images that respect the tradition of landscape art whilst seeking to subvert it. These are not grand oil paintings, nor romantic reconfigurations of the landscape to align with the picturesque. These works are emotional responses to direct experience of particular landscapes. Landscapes that have been walked, touched, breathed and worked. Look closely, and there is mud and dead plants as well as vista and beauty.
Grose works as sustainably as she can. She has a particularly personal relationship with her materials - wool from sheep she rears and shears and plants that she grows and forage.
She uses techniques such as spinning, dyeing, felting and carding to make this work. Craft-based practice tends to be associated with domesticity and folk traditions. Living Landscapes, created from peasant and gendered materials, challenge gender- and class-based assumptions of artistic value.
Landscape is, of course, a transient thing, but it is also redolent with memory and can be the rock on which we, individually or collectively, built our sense of place. Something worth shouting about.
This is an ongoing project.
