Where we Live

Lakeside Arts is hosting a nationally acclaimed exhibition of paintings exploring the landscape we inhabit today. Presenting five locations across England, Where We Live interrogates our social landscape at a time of profound political and social change.  Each series of paintings offers the viewer multiple perspectives on the notion of home and our sense of place. Tensions in the images between legacies of the past, the reality of the present and often conflicting visions of the future are layered with poetic texts foregrounding the voices of the residents. 

The five locations expose tensions and fault lines inherent to the English landscape:

• Park Hill, a large-scale Grade II-listed housing estate in Sheffield. Originally the site of back-to-back housing, Park Hill’s ‘streets in the sky’ were built in the late 1950s to great acclaim. After falling into disrepair in the 1990s, the flats are currently undergoing major redevelopment and renovation.   
• The all-but-erased history of Ashington, a post-industrial mining village in Northumberland, that was home to a group of artists known as the “Pitman Painters”.
• Residential architecture in Leeds rendered in modernist colour
• Contested coastal chalet plotlands in North Lincolnshire, whose history goes back to the early 20^th century, many of whose residents come from mining communities eviscerated after the 1984 Miners’ Strike.
• Re-imagined images from Estate Agent adverts in paintings that seek to recover everyday urban experience of the street and the notion of home from the commodification of the London property market. 

One of the artists, Mandy Payne, completed a BA Fine Arts degree at the School of Education.

Each artist raises acute questions of how England’s landscape and architecture is layered over potent legacies of the past, and reveals conflicted visions of the present and the future. In the wake of a pandemic that confined us to our homes, it questions what the idea of home looks and feels like in the midst of multiple displacements and disorientating political, social and environmental change. In doing so, the exhibition foregrounds the voices of the communities who inhabit the depicted locations in spoken texts by poets Harriet Tarlo and Helen Angell. 

The exhibition aims to demonstrate how the practice of making paintings in series over an extended period allows the artist to examine the multiple facets and topographies of a place. 

• Trevor Burgess has made residential housing in London the subject of over 60 paintings that obliquely critique contemporary obsessions with housing as a property market commodity.
• Jonathan Hooper has, for over ten years, intensively and exclusively focused his painting on observation of the urban and suburban environment of Leeds.
• Mandy Payne has devoted nine years to paintings focused on Park Hill, Grade II listed Sheffield council estate, one of Britain’s largest examples of Brutalist architecture.
• Narbi Price’s series of paintings of Ashington, Northumberland, are the product of many hours spent walking the streets of what was once the world’s largest mining village, in the footsteps of the Ashington Group of Pitmen Painters, recording a changed post-industrial landscape that they would barely recognise.
• Judith Tucker’s ongoing series of paintings Night Fitties, are devoted to the chalets on the Humberston Fitties in Lincolnshire as a locus for exploring how notions of place, identity and Englishness are constructed

The exhibiton is free to attend. Please visit the Lakeside Arts website for opening times.