Stephen Lawrence Gallery, 10 Stockwell Street, London SE10 9BD

Opening: 18 May – 18 June, 2021

Online launch: 20 May 2021 [17:00 – 18:00 UK time]

The Landscapists exhibition includes inventive landscape works by leading artists, designers, and researchers, including: Harry Bix; Luis Callejas and Charlotte Hansson; Emma Colthurst; James Corner; Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman; Drawing Architecture Studio; Larissa Fassler; Alexis Liu; Tiago Torres‐Campos; SCAPE; and Ed Wall.

Who designs our worlds? What practices are employed as contemporary landscapes are produced? The Landscapists exhibition sets out that landscapes are made and remade through interrelations between people and the worlds around them – from geographers investigating the lives of urban wastelands to landscape architects projecting future cities, and from migrants navigating border systems to artists working with local residents. In contrast to tendencies to emphasise the physical forms of landscapes, with their potential to be redesigned and represented in drawings, the exhibition brings to the forefront the social structure of landscapes by focusing on a range of critical practices and daily actions. As conventional frames of landscape are challenged, other ways of measuring, mapping, imagining, designing, building and occupying them are revealed. For centuries, artists and designers have represented landscapes of power in paintings and have transformed them through their design proposals. But in recent years, a number of researchers, designers, artists and activists have explored an expanded field of landscape, investigating populations fleeing conflict zones, reimagining cities facing ecological challenges, questioning territorial claims, and critiquing processes of urbanisation. 

The Landscapists exhibition is curated by Ed Wall, Emma Colthurst and Alexis Liu. It has developed from discourses and contributions to The Landscapists: Redefining Landscape Relations, an issue of Architectural Design, that was published by Wiley in 2020, and was guest-edited by Ed Wall.

[Image: Model 1, Valley Project, 2019, Project Studio, Ed Wall, Emma Colthurst]