Life and Death on the Ponderosa 2, (2021) George Shaw © Courtesy of the artist, Anthony Wilkinson Gallery

Village Greens, Hillsides and Conurbations
conversations from the Human Geography series
29.05.25 - 14.06.25
East Philip St, Salford, M3 7LE

John-Paul Brown
Angelina May Davis
Lewis Graham
George Shaw

This is the second show from the Human Geography series exploring art from outside London. The first exhibition was entitled Concentric Zone Theory, Post-London! (2017) co-presented by Lynda Morris featuring Dominic Allan (Dominic from Luton,) Adam Chodzko, Simon Linington, Barry Sykes, Emma Smith. (exhibition info at the bottom of the page).

Both exhibitions look at artists whose connection to a particular place or location is central to their work.

52°25'49"N 1°56'03"W
This map includes data from:AirbusData SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCOLandsat / Copernicus /Google Earth© Imagery from the dates: 08/04/2015–27/03/2025

Bournville Village Green, the Art College and the Chocolate Factory, West Midlands Conurbatio

Davis’s paintings reference ideas of the village as a kind of measure of Englishness, a pantomimic England with exaggerated symbolism and a vivid cartoon-like pallete, in a 2022 interview with the artist, Fay Nicolson, Davis expands on this subject when asked about her relationship with class and landscape;

“Villages seem to magnify those things (class). And there are signs everywhere, the local history society, the amateur dramatic group. Moving to a city when I went to art college in Coventry in the 80’s was a culture shock. I was terribly homesick and missed everything that I had become bored of. Now I live in Bournville in Birmingham in what is essentially a village. It has a village green, a cricket pitch, boating lake etc. My parents worked and met at Cadbury so I have come full circle. And the artificiality of Bournville isn’t lost on me either. It’s a constructed world, frozen in time and like all those other model villages it has moved from being a place for workers to a highly desirable, and in parts exclusive, estate beyond the means of the average worker.”

Angelina May Davis
Staging Nature, An interview with Angelina May Davis, Salome Salon

52°25'15"N 2°05'56"W

Google Earth© Imagery from the dates:08/04/2015–08/03/2022
The Four Standing Stones of Clent

Lewis Graham’s paintings depict both real and imagined locations around the Clent Hills a small group of hills dividing the Midlands from Worcestershire, a barrier to the advance and sprawl of The West Midlands and the Black Country. Lewis’s work is a purposeful and ongoing exploration of one place, on the precipice of the Birmingham Plateau.
Historically, the hills have their own stories of lore from Roman skirmishes to St Kenelm's martyrdom, as described in legends, which occurred when he was beheaded in the Clent Hills by Askobert, his sister's lover. In the 18th century, George, 1st Lord Lyttelton installed the Lyttelton follies; a Greek temple, an Egyptian obelisk, a medieval castle and ‘Stone Age’ standing stones, all created between 1747 and 1758 designed by Lord Camelford, Thomas Pitt of Encombe, Henry Keene, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, and Sanderson Miller. In recent history, the Client Hills have been, and continues to be a place of recreation for the West Midlands work force, an escape away from the industry of the Black Country and Birmingham. The hills are flanked by the towns, villages and road systems, the barrier to the sprawl of The West Midlands conurbation, only second in size to Greater London, home to over 2.5 million people.

“I am drawn to the hills. Maybe I escape there? Clent is why I make landscape paintings, they were the only landscape growing up. From up there you can literally throw a stone into Birmingham, from Waseley you can peer over Longbridge at the ghost of the old Rover car factory, and on a clear day you can make out Dudley Castle and Zoo , you can even see *Richard Billinghams’ high rise flat in Cradley Heath.
At first I was making landscape paintings and drawings of the places familiar to me, over time I realised the hill paintings represent much more, they are my sense of this place. Ambitiously I want Clent to be, what Cookham was to Stanley Spencer or Northampton is for Alan Moore. For now it is a focus on, or an escape to the hills! Like, for so many others, the hills always were and remain an escape for people, be it a Lord pretending, playing amongst his follies or the working people of the Black County seeking fresh air the hills both except and repel us, dividing the green shires from the Black Country and Brum.”

Lewis Graham in conversation with Division of Labour 2025

*Ray’s a Laugh. Richard Billingham, first shown at Sensation, Saatchi Gallery 1997, the exhibition and subsequent book shows photographs of the artists family tower block in Cradley Heath.

52°24'22"N 1°34'36"W
Google Earth© Imagery from the dates: 27/05/2022
Tile Hill, Coventry

George Shaw grew up in Tile Hill, a post-war housing estate on the south side of Coventry.

“I started to make these paintings (Tile Hill series) out of a kind of mourning for the person I used to be: an enthusiastic, passionate teenager who read art books and novels and poems and biographies and watched films and TV and listened to music and dreamed. They are paintings of places that were familiar to me in my childhood and adolescence, places in which I found myself alone and thoughtful. They are places in which I forgot things. ... I paint the paintings of all the times and all the thoughts I lack the language to describe. For the one single moment that I can recall, I feel a dull sadness for the thousands I have forgotten.”

George Shaw / The Tate Magazine

For this exhibition we are showing three works from 2021 featured as studies for paintings as shown in Albion Groans (Part 1) at Anthony Wilkinson Gallery 16.11.24 - 18.01.25. ‘The title of the exhibition came from William Blake’s epic poem, ‘Jerusalem’. For Blake, Albion is both a character and a place. It is both man and woman, human and metaphysical, both Britain and the wider western world, a city and a land. Albion is an ideal, a lost innocence, a trampled dream.’

“Each painting in the exhibition is a little groan really. For how things have turned out and are turning out. It sounds less bleak than you’d first think because painting goes on and continues as an act of resistance to the mess we make of life around us and times inevitable and dreadful work. As Blake says elsewhere in ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Continually building, continually decaying.”

George Shaw / Courtesy of Anthony Wilkinson Gallery

53°29'23"N 2°15'10"W
Google Earth© Imagery from the dates:07/04/2023
The River Irwell from Salford, Paradise Works.

John-Paul Brown’s most recent work looks at the River Irwell. The rivers course takes it across ‘The Greater Manchester Combined Authority’, flowing through Bury, Manchester and Salford.

“Despite its poor health due to forever chemicals it is still affirming to see nature’s resilience and ability to reclaim urban environments. Here, seeking evidence of the River’s former meanderings prior to the recent urban development. This former section of the Irwell caused extreme flooding, industrial closures, mass social rehousing and displacement in 1950,60’s Salford. This research informs a new installation titled ‘As if you were a River’ highlighting the effects of flooding, river pollution, displacement, and migration in both a local, and global context.”

John-Paul Brown talking about his recent artwork, ‘As if you were a River’ from ‘Hoarfrost On Our Lips’ curated by Will Marshal at Paradise Works Saturday 8th July 2024

For this exhibition Brown will make new work in-situ on a ‘Human Geography’ revolving blackboard salvaged from his studio housed in a school, as part of the artists ongoing activism and artwork based on sustainability and ephemeral works.

Concentric Zone Theory - Post-London!
conversations from the Human Geography Series
17.09.2017 - 30.10.2017

Concentric Zone Theory; five artists from the Home Counties. On Sunday 17th September 2017 a conversation took place chaired by Lynda Morris.

Artists are asked to bring a chair from their studio or home to the gallery, sit and discuss working outside London. The conversation was recorded, edited and printed in Division of Labour's first bi-monthly newsletter, with guest editor Lynda Morris who proclaims:

POST-LONDON !

Lynda Morris moderated a discussion from her provocation; ‘Post-London!’ Artists include Emma Smith whose work is often site specific, investigating local historic behaviours in relation to the present, considering how we might all relate to any place, any time through transitory modes of belonging and practices of place being. Barry Sykes representing his project for 'Radical Essex' where Sykes explores an amateur history of social nudity in modern Essex between 1896 and 2017. Dominic Allan aka 'Dominic from Luton' who has published the eponymous titled monograph of works made largely in Luton. Simon Linington will reflect upon personal and social histories of place with work based out of Isle of Wight and Adam Chodzko whose work over 20 years has often focussed on communities and networks outside the capital at the edge, both geographically and culturally.

* All seats taken
Above; bottom clockwise: ‘Coors’ beer Chair (Dominic Allan) Crass Chair (Adam Chodzko) Studio (off-cuts) Chair (Simon Linnington) Family Chair (Emma Smith) Naturalist Towel (Barry Sykes)