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Sacred Cartography

Stanley Donwood

Jealous East

24 Nov 2022 — 24 Dec 2022

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Ending the year on a high, Jealous is pleased to present an exhibition with Stanley Donwood, which follows on from his popular showcase ‘Modern Landscapes’ at Saatchi Gallery this year.

The exhibition features ‘Sacred Cartography’ screenprints, which originate from the ‘Sacred Landscapes’ paintings at the Saatchi Gallery, painstakingly translated into print form in the Jealous Print Studios.

“The title relates to the subject matter, which are eight large screenprints. I made these pictures by a close study of ordnance survey maps, which are very detailed maps covering the islands of Britain. They show everything - pylons, hedges, parish boundaries, everything." - Stanley Donwood

"I photocopy these maps and then white out everything that's text, any words, any numbers, then set about erasing the present, kind of digging into the past, removing industrial estates, motorways, houses, and keep going back, until all that are left are the oldest trackways, the burial mounds and barrows, the stone circles and earthworks that are all that remain of the people who came long before us. I've tried to excavate what remains of what was sacred to those people; the lay of the land, the hilltops, the grave-mounds, the corpse-paths." - Stanley Donwood

Waylands Smithy

Pilton

Long Man

Avebury

Cissbury

Cerne Abbas

Salisbury Plain

"When I started this work I became fascinated with the relationship between land and sky. Rather than seeing the land and the sky as separate, I saw them as two halves of the same interconnected whole. The idea is that the land and the heavens are intimately connected, both physically, through transpiration and evaporation and precipitation, but also in other, hidden, mysterious ways. It’s not for nothing that people have always worshipped the skies, that our gods dwell above us. So in my paintings of sacred landscapes, each carefully delineated field pours its colour upwards, up into the black heavens.” - Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood

Artist

Stanley Donwood is a British artist and writer, who is widely known for his evocative and haunting imagery, creating Radiohead’s distinctive visual identity. He has had solo exhibitions across the world and released an extensive book of his artwork in 2019, published by Thames and Hudson.