Brutal Land : Exhibition 2026

ianrpea
Jan 5
3 min read

Updated: Jan 15

"Don't be fooled, the Countryside is a pretty picture postcard that would kill you in the Night"

I've always been a City dweller. Whether it be on estates on the edge of an African town or in the City that truly never sleeps; Johannesburg. The dynamic of a City is a man-made thing and is an apt summation of an evolution that started, perhaps begrudgingly, with the idea that a community is a wholesome, protective and productive thing. Mankind was tempted off the land by the dream that money is master and nothing is worth doing without it. Humanity, for the greater majority now exist within one, and for the most part, our instincts and creativity are now shaped by City life; the coexistence of millions of individuals.

Despite my opening opinion I never aspired to live in the countryside. I never sought to escape the City into it; perhaps I never thought that escape was essential. Since I arrived in the UK to live in the place where my ancestory is at home I possibly thought that Britain was just one big concrete existence with the bits of land between them where there were houses tucked away, as some kind of eccentric isolation, or where food originates.

Quite by accident did I come to live in the countryside. On the Land, in the Landscape. In the History of Art, Landscape painting started as simply ornmentation. Nature as adornment, in the background. Landscape Art came to the foreground during the Industrial Revolution when artists like Gainsborough and Constable documented rural life. Turner then started to document nature as a force in its own right. Simplistically of course.

My work started with an investigation into the lives of my family history within a City that was created with the sole purpose of the expoitation of the coal seam and its marriage to that other utilitarian element called Clay. My family history is one that was shaped by the Industrial Revolution, from the Scottish land clearances orchestrated by The Duke of Sutherland to French migrants from the Black Country, who all gravitated to Stoke-On-Trent for one reason or another. My Sutherland Works Studio was in the beating heart of Longton until the intervention of politics and a business decision made as a result of it.

Through the word of a contact in art circles I found myself and my creative tools in a barn on a small family farm nestled in the stunning beauty of the Staffordshire countryside. I was only seven miles from the City but it might as well have been a million. Creatively, I could not reconcile representing post-industrial turmoil in this place when my eyes and mind were learning a new and strange visual language.

I recall a book in my school library back in Malawi, in Central Africa, about British Landscape Mythology and Folk Tales. I remember it as a total detachment to anything I had ever seen or could possibly concieve, but the illustrations of dwarfes and trolls, hobgoblins and faeries were magical. Tolkien shaped such things into a gargantuan and astounding tale, and I thought nothing more about it. This landscape that I found myself upon had a magical energy and that long lost book bubbled up through my subconcious looking for expression.

Within a month of the introduction to this new, other-worldly workspace, my partner and I had found somewhere to live in the immediate proxiimity and thus began a story that presents itself upon the walls of this exhibition, in a venue on the same landscape give or take a mile connected by walks along ancient paths.

Brutal Land is a summation of all the work and paintings I have created whilst living in this part of the World for the past Four years.

The exhibition will also introduce the workings of all my latest thoughts taking shape from an ongoing walk from Maer Village to an event that was the Battle of Blore Heath near Market Drayton. I'm working with my partner, the poet Lindsay Bainbridge, to bring some local magic to walls of Festival Market Drayton.