In The Open | Luce Choules & E Jackson

Luce Choules was born in Henley-on-Thames. Base camp is the UK and she operates from field centres established in France and Spain. She undertakes international environmental arts residencies and commissions, in addition to funded projects in the UK and personal research in the mountains of southern Europe. Her interest is in an environmental shift in human nature; and her work looks at the movement of animate and inanimate objects through the gesture of behaviour. She works in still and moving image and the intermedia between performance and sculpture. Choules is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), and Founder/coordinator of the itinerant artist network TSOEG (Temporal School of Experimental Geography). She presents talks and papers on the subject of fieldwork in artistic practice as an independent researcher, and has exhibited widely.

E. Jackson was born in Manchester and lives and works in Essex after many years living abroad. Jackson uses painting, printmaking, photography and objects to explore the ambient space of experience and the geometrical space of the picture plane. Her interest lies in how time-based theories from natural science and philosophy translate into frameworks for composition, surface and scene in painting. Specifically, can a painting be made within the same temporal space as experience? She also produces small print editions and artists’ books for individuals, public collections and national libraries. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include The Opposite of Now, Guest Projects, London (2017); and Esparto, Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades, Barcelona, Spain (2018).

During May this year, Choules and Jackson undertook collaborative fieldwork in southern Spain in the mountainous area of Murcia where esparto grass grows. This bookwork is made to define our shared work field – research, practice, survey and landscape. The esparto paper, which forms the ‘ground’ of the bookwork, was made in collaboration with artist Alex Coll Boy and El Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades near Barcelona using esparto grass harvested from the fieldwork sites in southern Spain. This piece is the first in a series of publications that are being created to accompany an exhibition of esparto fieldworks in 2018.