Et in Arcadia ego

During the first lockdown, unable to access print workshops, I decided to treat this time in my home studio as an artists ‘residency’ working in an immediate, responsive way.

Idiosyncratic paths began as a visual diary. They document daily walks into the surrounding landscape, walks that frequently circled the perimeter of Stowe Landscape Gardens. 

  Stowe has an assortment of 37 temples, follies, grottos and bridges within its grounds and was never just a garden. Created in the grounds of his family home from 1717, Viscount Cobham, set the gardens out to reflect his power, his beliefs about the politics and his social ideals.

The gardens which were overseen by William Kent include early work by Capability Brown and are a famous example of the new English style of landscape garden.

 This new picturesque style in landscape gardening was a conscious manipulation of nature in order to highlight a selection of provocative formal elements. 

Arising as it did as a mediator between the opposed ideals of beauty and the sublime, the aesthetic preferences of the picturesque were driven by nationalistic statements about incorporating goods and scenery from one’s own country, by framing mechanisms which dictated the overall experience, and by a simultaneous embracing of irregular qualities. 

At Stowe the hidden meanings embedded in the Paths of Vice, of Virtue and of Liberty, echo much current debate; colonial slavery, political aspirations, taking the virtuous path and perceptions of British dominance.