Interrogating Landscapes by Dorset Visual Arts

The project, devised by Dorset Visual Arts, is called Interrogating Landscapes.

Works of art will be on display at Bridport Arts Centre until May 10 as part of Dorset’s Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty spring programme, called Drawing Inspiration.

A different landscapes display will go on show at Bridport Arts Centre for Dorset Art Weeks from May 24 to June 8.

Each artist has chosen a site to ‘interrogate’ in various creative ways, by means such as sketches, photographs, collage and making pigments.

Some are working together at the same site after dividing it geographically or conceptually.

Work will be shown in its raw state. Artists’ spontaneous responses and considered studies and experiments will be seen, with sketchbooks laid out or pages photographed, accompanied by notes.

Jem Main, director of Dorset Art Weeks and himself an artist, conceived the project.

He said: “It is an opportunity to bring members together to share ideas and processes, pool visual research and to encourage experimentation.

“It is stretching us, reinvigorating our creativity.”

One of the artists taking part is Jindra Jehu, who is working at Abbotsbury Hill Fort and who started by collecting items such as lichen-covered gorse and hawthorn, a feather, a seed head and a crystal-encrusted flint.

She has documented the groups of objects through drawing and photography and has experimented with DIY macro photography using old manual SLR lenses and a digital SLR body.

She said: “I’m excited by the initial results, the potential of the process and by the idea of taking an alternative view of a landscape by looking in close-up at life and the ecosystems there,” she said.

Stephen Yates has been braving the elements since the start of the year at Kingcombe where the bad weather on his initial visits meant photography was the only option. His studies of the lines revealed in the photographs have resulted in sketches and paintings.