In The Open | Inge Panneels & Kevin Greenfield

Inge Panneels is an artist and academic at the University of Sunderland, whose work explores notions of space, using glass as a preferred medium for place making projects. Latterly her practice has shifted to research into the trope of the map and mapping methodologies, the subject of a current AHRC funded PhD at Northumbria University with a chapter on Mapping in Art (Kent, A - Vujakovic, P. The Routledge Handbook on Mapping and Cartography, Routledge, 2018)

Kevin Greenfield is an outdoor enthusiast and was an experienced guide in the Snowdon mountains before studying photography and running his own photographic studio. His personal work explores the interactions between the public and the natural landscape they wish to visit; examining the reality of the landscape and our perception of it, in our minds eye. He has recently returned to his passion for both mountaineering and photography in a new body of work.

Panneels and Greenfield have worked together for many years, which gradually grew into a genuine collaborative partnership of which Claude Glass is the latest project.

This is a collaboration between artist Inge Panneels and photographer and mountaineer Kevin Greenfield. William Wordsworth famously walked up Snowdon from Bedgellert. The artists retraced Wordsworth’s steps, and photographed the landscape at various points framing it through a Claude Glass made by Panneels. A Claude Glass was a framing device invented in the 18th century by the landscape painter Claude Lorrain. The dark grey cast glass has a highly polished flat surface, which reflects the surrounding landscape when placed strategically. The photograph records the temporary and illusory moment of simultaneous vision as it creates on one plane two simultaneous points of view. The artist book brings together the photographs of the landscape, the glass in the landscape and the literary references that have influenced this work. Claude Glass thus offers not only a historical link between the 18th and the 21st century but also an alternative vision of the landscape.