Mothland: Paintings and Editions

Alan Rankle MOTHLAND

BERMONDSEY PROJECT SPACE

Alan Rankle MOTHLAND PAINTINGS & EDITIONS CURATED BY CLAUDIA DE GRANDI

CONTENTS

BERMONDSEY PROJECT SPACE

Introduction

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Mothland Alan Rankle

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Riverfall and other works Roger Woods

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Painting & landscape: extending the dialogue Clea H Notar

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Pastoral Collateral

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Castle Paintings

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Turner in Hastings

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Not Dark Yet Judy Parkinson

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Biographical notes

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Acknowledgments

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Alan Rankle MOTHLAND PAINTINGS & EDITIONS CURATED BY CLAUDIA DE GRANDI

Bermondsey Project Space is pleased to present a new collection of works by Alan Rankle following on from his critically acclaimed exhibition Pastoral Collateral of two years ago. Mothland: Paintings & Editions curated by Claudia De Grandi.

In these recent paintings, works on paper and videos Rankle continues and develops his major themes of relating the idealized tradition of Sublime Romantic landscape art to the increasingly fragmented, clearly insanely broken relationship of our global societies to the natural environment.

Pictures in the exhibition are from three series, Pastoral Collateral where the artist reflects on his roots growing up in the Northern landscape amid the detritus of the Industrial Revolution; the Castle Paintings created initially for Capture the Castle an historical survey exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery, where he montaged images of bombed out ruins in Syria to provide the backdrop to elegantly depicted, picturesque views of English castles; and Turner in Hastings an ongoing visual essay considering the artists such as Turner, Whistler, De Wint and the English watercolourists who stayed and worked around Rankle’s adopted town of St Leonards-on-Sea. A new series of hand-finished prints, Not Dark Yet, accompanies the paintings.

Untitled Painting XIV 2014 Oils on canvas, 120x150cm Private Collection

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MOTHLAND ALAN RANKLE Walking along the banks of the Winchester Watermeadows at dusk, I noticed congregations of flying insects – mayflies, dragonflies, moths… and all across the water surface, waterboatmen skating and beetles shimmering with air bubbles diving up and down, and midges in hovering clans.

It occurred to me how these creatures, while in the same physical space as me were really inhabiting another universe.

All the differences in scale, perception, ability to fly or be above, below and even on the membrane surface of the water all contributing to a completely other way of experiencing the same environment.

As nightfall encroached on the landscape I became aware of the bats flitting along the riverbank and high up into the trees, hoovering up gnats and honing in on larger prey.

Blind bats chasing moths by means of sonar and moths, somehow aware in the darkening sky

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of the bats presence, are fluttering ever upwards towards the last rays of light beyond the trees in an instinctive ploy towards escape.

These creatures are using different vibrations and rhythms along the spectrum of perception than ourselves – just as dogs hear sounds beyond our hearing – the moth and the bat are privy to other ways of perceiving.

The idea of being in the same place yet at the same time in a different world.

When I began to make the paintings of the Watermeadows at Fairlight I thought a lot about these ideas and called the series Mothland.

There isn’t a concept for the work or any kind of conclusion, yet these ideas made me think about how our perception of the world around also helps to create it and the transforming potential of our perception increases our vision.

RIVERFALL AND OTHER WORKS ROGER WOODS In The Goncourt Journals, Chardin is quoted as saying:

“But who told you one paints with colours?

One uses colour, but one paints with feelings”.

All painters are aware of the mysterious judgements – one might say inner demands which determine, quite independently of any consideration of actual representation, the sense of ‘rightness’ of the painterly gesture as the work proceeds from moment to moment.

Alan Rankle’s paintings engage in the dialectic between the means of art and the sensations before the subject in a particularly acute way. He seeks to suspend the painting at that balanced point just before the mark, in all its expressiveness, dissolves into the illusion of the image.

Rankle’s work falls, at first sight at least, into that modernist genre the abstract landscape, which appears after the first wave of abstract expressionism. Landscape has always demanded abstraction because its overwhelming complexity and scale necessitate generalisation, and this is as true of Ruisdael or Poussin as much as De Kooning. Rankle is fully aware of this, and exploits all the historical possibilities of the landscape tradition by entering into a complex dialogue with the representational codes of landscape art from several periods and cultures. He disrupts the unity of a single code in order to extend the possibilities of the genre, not in an ironic or mocking way, but affirmatively, to express continuity and development. Thus, in Memo from Turner or Landscape of the Fall II a ‘naturalistic’ tree is

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It’s Not Dark Yet XV (detail on page 37) 2017 Pigmented ink, Conté, acrylic, on paper 47x31cm

interrupted and surrounded by strongly gestural swathes of thick paint and dribbling glazes, not depictive of but ‘like’ a landscape, which yet give, paradoxically, the exact sensation of the golden twilight of the ‘Picturesque’ manner. In other works, calligraphic marks and areas of gold leaf refer to the language of Chinese painting. Rankle studied Chinese monochrome brush painting and the martial art T’ai Chi Ch’uan (the latter is an integral part of the former) after his ‘Western’ art education at Goldsmith’s College. The practise of T’ai Chi, the discipline and contemplation, the harmonisation and balance of the energies of the body, prepare for the moment of enlightened response with brush in hand the ‘right’ mark or gesture, made by the body without the hesitation which might come from the intervention of the brain. One might note in this context the interest of the abstract expressionists in oriental art, particularly calligraphy, where what was originally pictographic takes on an independent life of its own as an expressive gesture.

Pierce identifies three kinds of sign: the Iconic, the Symbolic and the Indexical, Rankle would like to have all three in play. Any figurative work employs iconicity insofar as the configuration of marks forms a visual equivalent or likeness to the objects represented. Symbolic signs are usually iconic as well, and refer to the conventional or allegorical meaning of images, but could, in Rankle’s work, be equivalent to historical styles or conventions, in that they refer to the cultural and historical developments of a particular period in the history of art. The most elusive kind of sign is the indexical, in that it is metonymic, the trace or imprint of the object. At the most simple level, this could be a

footprint as a sign of the human presence, but beyond this perhaps lies the possibility of finding some metaphorical equivalent for the language of ‘feelings’ inscribed in the painters’ work.

In psychoanalytic terms, the ego is originally a bodily ego, formed from the id, itself a borderline concept, marking the point where the experience of the body achieves representation in the mind in the form of desire. Signs used for thinking about the creative process, which result in the symbol for feeling which is art, are derived, variously, from the stages of interest in different aspects of somatic experience. The inner life can only be made knowable in terms of the outer life, which is the life of the body expressed in terms of a sensuous medium and language, with all its complexities of tensions and releases, balances and spatiality.

These signs in art, show in their formal patterning, similar qualities and themes. Though no language can encompass the unconscious determinants of the painter’s response whilst working one might use the bodily analogy to intuit the character of the painterly gesture: its speed, direction, scale, pressure, tenderness or aggression, the texture of paint, fluid, dry, crumbly, enamelled or translucent.

Nor is this just a matter of character.

Francis Bacon said: “Real imagination is technical imagination. It is the search for the technique to trap the object at a given moment. Then the technique and the object become inseparable. Art lies in the continuous struggle to come near to the sensory side of objects”.

Courtesy of Artline International and the estate of Roger Woods, first published in 1993

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PAINTING & LANDSCAPE: EXTENDING THE DIALOGUE CLEA H NOTAR As was so pointedly illustrated by much of the performance work and ideas of Joseph Beuys, contemporary culture has become characterised by the mediation of science and technology to such an extent that we have had to invent for ourselves or discover in other cultures, rituals with which we can re-experience nature; by which we can free it from ideology. This return to an integrated state constitutes a hope against the threat posed to nature by a Western culture of hyper-consumerism and hyper-fragmentation. In this context the role of the landscape artist has become more urgently political just as the reappropriation of our environment as an objectified and reified image has become a politicised act. The history of Western landscape painting is littered with the representation of nature as a backdrop for portraits of power; the land having been reduced to a sigh of the power of patriarchal man to tame and possess. Images which acknowledge a plurality of possible origins, representations and states of reception, are images which imply integration and equilibrium, ideas which stand opposed to hierarchy and property ownership. Alan Rankle’s painting is concerned with the ‘disruption of tradition rather than its abandonment’. It is born from a studied practice and an empathetic and receptive immersion with his subject matter; our natural environment.

At the age of sixteen, as a student at Rochdale College, Alan Rankle developed an early interest in Chinese painting and poetry. He also encountered and was inspired by the ideas of John Cage, through a guest lecturer at Rochdale, a Black Mountain student. At Goldsmiths’ College Rankle wrote his

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It’s Not Dark Yet I 2017 Pigmented ink, Conté, acrylic, on paper 47x31cm

BA thesis on the Origin and Development of Early Chinese Landscape Art. At this time landscape work was being translated into acts of land art and earth work by Christo, Robert Smithson and Richard Long amongst others. A commitment to landscape painting would have been highly unfashionable at the time – the iconoclastic art stance within the iconoclastic art world. Rankle remains active in both the tradition of landscape painting and the burgeoning movement of installation and performance, all the while continuing to explore the ideas and culture of both the East and West.

It was during a six year period in Yorkshire, where Rankle produced the Endless River Landscapes, a series which were his first major group of works to relate the precepts of Chinese painting to the Western naturalistic tradition of landscape painting.

It was here, too, that Rankle first concentrated solely on the medium of painting. Using oils, pastels and watercolours, he created small scale studies which were painted, en plein air; simultaneously continuing and commenting on the tradition of the landscape painter literally painting in the field.

The image is one which fits a mythopeic vision of the Romantic nineteenth century landscape painter out in the great – bourgeois – expanse of the English countryside, however it is also one which, when viewed with a disruptive ironic humour, comments on that particular ‘way of seeing’ the artist and the art’s subject matter. For this stage in Rankle’s work was also a deferential nod towards and practice of, landscape painting, which Western innovators in colour, form and approach, such as Whistler, Monet and Hitchens (the latter with whose work and ideas Rankle shows a certain affinity)

practised as part of a search, not only to express a voice particular to their time, but also to discover a more dialogic approach to landscape painting, such as the one inherent in Chinese painting.

Dialogue is the key to Rankle’s work. His paintings – and his ongoing involvement and commitment to art which is available to and active within the community – encourage the expansion of views, not to mystify or solidify knowledge. If his work draws a veil, it draws a visible one in order to call attention to itself; a veil of gold leaf on copper or dripping paint; of glazed and scumbled layers over heavily wrought textures, deliberately offsetting the conventional tensions of surface and space, illusion and reality in the structure of the painting. It disrupts and interrupts itself in order to disrupt and interrupt the tradition of ‘fine’ art and landscape painting, to pry open the restrictive and reductive approach to viewing art and to the artist’s viewing of his or her subject matter.

The experience of Alan Rankle’s paintings is one which includes and reflects back upon the viewer, just as subject matter is included and reflected back upon. This absolute integration of the works in their environment, be it in a gallery, in a specific architectural space, or in public, is what ultimately gives them their optimism – like a double-sided mirror through which we can both see ourselves and pass through to the other side to see what lies beyond – and their dynamism – the potential born from the dialectics of discourse to spark transformation.

Reprinted from Painting and Landscape: Extending the Dialogue, exhibition catalogue, Southampton City Art Gallery, 1993

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PASTORAL COLLATERAL In an interview with Anna McNay about his Pastoral Collateral series the artist stated: ‘I wanted to relate ideas about historical, idealised, pastoral landscape in art to the grim reality of the environmental crisis that we are in, which isn’t just an environmental crisis anymore, it’s a totally impregnated social and political crisis heading towards disaster. Considering the historical origins of the genre in relation to my own paintings, I wanted to convey the irony implicit in how the 19th century Romantic movement, with its emphasis on the idyllic natural world of an imaginary past, was sponsored by people who, having made gigantic fortunes out of the Industrial Revolution by building their empires on the slave trade and the criminal use of the Enclosures Acts forcing the poor from their traditional peasant homes to work in their factories and mills, also laid the foundations of environmental pollution on a catastrophic scale’.

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Turner and other artists were commissioned by the barons of the Industrial Revolution to take the Grand Tour and pick up ideas from artists such as Claude Lorrain, Titian, Dughet and Poussin, who were themselves employed to evoke the fantasy of a golden age, a sort of Narnia in Ancient Greece and Rome, where people talked to animals and fucked gods.

While you can’t look at any period of history without seeing similar scenarios, where the art is created for the tyrants and oppressors, this dichotomy of the landscape of Romance is particularly and acutely about the subject that I’ve been interested and involved in. It’s impossible to work in landscape art without it being a political act, and I thought let’s put this right up front. So that’s the title.’

Extract from an Interview with Anna McNay for International Times, 2018

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Fairlight from the Watermeadows IV (Goya) 2018 Oils on canvas, 100x80cm Private collection

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Fairlight from the Watermeadows V 2018 Oils on canvas, 91x76cm

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Untitled painting XXIV 2018 Oils on canvas, 150x120cm Private Collection

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Untitled painting XXV (Montsegur) 2019 Oils on canvas, 150x135cm

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Private Collection

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CASTLE PAINTINGS Alan Rankle’s ongoing Castle Paintings series was recognized in Southampton City Art Gallery’s Capture the Castle exhibition, which featured artists from Turner and Wilson to contemporaries such as Christopher Le Brun and Norman Ackroyd. In her essay for the accompanying book, Judy Parkinson writes of Rankle’s work: Castles summon up the stuff of fairy tales, fortifications and fabrications, standing tall in their designated aims to be both offensive and defensive at the same time. They are symbols of power from where raids are launched and they exist as secure depositories of stratagems and secrets.

The word ‘castle’ comes from the Latin castellum, a diminutive of castrum meaning ‘fortified place’. The word entered the English language, with somewhat unfortunate timing for the English, just before the Norman Conquest.

Untitled Painting XXIII (Lindisfarne), 2017 embodies themes of border control and religious bans both of which galvanise us today, and Rankle alludes to these contemporary fears in this work.

Lindisfarne Castle rises out of Holy Island in the

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North Sea close to where England and Scotland meet. In 635 St Aidan founded a monastery on Holy Island and it would remain a holy site through Viking invasions and the Norman Conquest. In the mid-sixteenth century the English, under Henry VII, protected the border against the hated Scots, and when the King took against Catholics the site was fortified using stones from the dismantled priory.

‘These paintings are part of an ongoing series of works about castles and their iconic relevance to modern times,’ states Alan Rankle.

‘I first addressed this theme working in a studio at St Quentin la Tour, a twelfth century maison forte in the region of the Cathars in South West France in 1986. These recent subjects Bodiam and Lindisfarne were, like many castles, built to dominate what are stunningly beautiful landscapes, which to contemporary observers provide a reassuringly picturesque context to the barbarism enacted within and without their walls.’

Judy Parkinson – Extract from Capture the Castle Sansom & Co. 2017

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Untitled painting XXIII (Lindisfarne) 2017 Oils on canvas, 100x80cm

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Untitled painting XXVI (Bodiam) 2018 Oils on canvas, 100x100cm Private Collection

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Untitled painting XXII (Bodiam) 2017 Oils on canvas, 135x140cm Private Collection

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TURNER IN HASTINGS Rankle’s other series of works in the exhibition, Turner in Hastings, while clearly acknowledging his debt to the masters of the English Watercolour School, might at first sight appear to be wholly lyrical and celebratory in outlook. On closer inspection these storm wracked cliffs and ominously coloured seas seem to depict a vision of an elemental world imagined before, and by implication possibly after, the brief tenure of mankind in the context of the relentless evolution of the Earth.

As the artist puts it ‘The flurry of Romanticism wherein we appreciated the sublime divinity of Nature remains as a shadow, hanging across the changing skies of these paintings like the grin of the Cheshire Cat – a fleeting moment destined to be as forgotten as our species itself’.

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Turner in Hastings I (detail on previous spread) 2014 Oils on canvas, 60x80cm

Turner in Hastings II (detail on following spread) 2019 Oils on canvas, 80x140cm

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NOT DARK YET JUDY PARKINSON This series of prints, originally commissioned for Le Meridian Grand Hotel in Nuremberg as a pivotal aspect of it’s acclaimed restoration project, Alan Rankle sees light and meaning within the darkness while reflecting the highly polished, streamlined deco interiors of the building’s renowned architecture where man-made modernity convenes with precious metals, and machine bevelled shapes wrap themselves around natural curvatures. Rankle’s pastoral scenes celebrate the hotel’s original place in rural history. The building began life as a farmhouse with a hop store and was developed in 1895 as a hotel with 80 rooms.

In the Middle Ages Nuremberg was a crucible of dissent during the Protestant Reformation, and its many printing presses rolled out messages of discontent, prompting Martin Luther to call the city the eyes and ears of Germany.

During WWII the Grand Hotel became the HQ of the infamous SS and also the venue of their trials. It is a building with clearly significant historical connections and the dark, sonorous contemporary interior, featuring the It’s Not Dark Yet prints and other works

by Rankle on every floor, doesn’t seek to alleviate the austere aspect of the architecture.

Rankle’s contemporary message is clear as we look through his portals of understanding and engage with his premonitions. His concerns are not quite as rebellious as those of the past, they are, it could be argued, more like clarion calls of dark foreboding. Today’s omens; devastating weather events, political fragmentation, nuclear brinkmanship, great movements of peoples are perhaps not so far removed from the catastrophic fears of 1498; comets, eclipses, floods and plagues to which the great artist Albrecht Dürer alluded in his fantastical and 36

pioneering wood cut Apocalypse series, not least in The four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Dürer is one of Nuremberg’s most revered sons and it was natural for Rankle to investigate some of his powerful themes of doom and dread and revisit them in the light of today’s prevailing mood. We might not be as superstitious as folk when the 15th century folded into the 16th, but our fears for planet earth and the destiny of humankind are just as real.

‘The landscape element in the theme is paramount,’ states Rankle, ‘and it lies within the tradition of using nature as a metaphor for reflection.

A lot of my literary heroes from Li Po to Henry David Thoreau, along with Bob Dylan and his great inspiration John Keats, have written on the subject of contemplation and the symbolism of woodlands and water at the turning point of the day.’

The prints in this series are based on details from Rankle’s archive of landscape paintings and they are remixed in new proportions chosen in consultation with the hotel architects, firstly as near monochrome images in charcoal and silver, and then with an added fillip of lemon and ochre to recall the patinations of brass.

This collection of imagery sees Rankle taking inspiration from Bob Dylan. ‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there’ is a Dylan lyric. The day of reckoning is nigh and a fierce sense of endings weaves its sad way through this song. What does Dylan mean – the end of the day, the end of an affair, or simply the end?

Or all of the above? Dylan, in darkest of moods, has humanity going down the drain, drowning in a whirlpool of lies, but not yet. There is hope. Night will fall and there is light in the darkness. Rivers will flow into the sea. The light of dawn will break through the darkness.

But not yet.

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It’s Not Dark Yet I 2017 Pigmented ink, Conté, acrylic, on paper

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47x31cm

It’s Not Dark Yet II 2017 Pigmented ink, Conté, acrylic, on paper 47x31cm

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It’s Not Dark Yet IV 2017 Pigmented ink, Conté, acrylic, on paper

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47x31cm

It’s Not Dark Yet V 2017 Pigmented ink, Conté, acrylic, on paper 47x31cm

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It’s Not Dark Yet IX 2017 Pigmented ink, Conté, acrylic, on paper

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47x31cm

It’s Not Dark Yet X 2017 Pigmented ink, Conté, acrylic, on paper 47x31cm

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It’s Not Dark Yet XIX 2017 Pigmented ink, Conté, acrylic, on paper

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47x31cm

It’s Not Dark Yet XX 2017 Pigmented ink, Conté, acrylic, on paper 47x31cm

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Alan Rankle is an artist and curator whose work explores historical, social and environmental issues informed by his interest in the evolution of landscape art.

Since his first exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London in 1973 while still a student at Goldsmiths College, he has worked variously in painting, video, photography, printmaking, architectural intervention and curating, through a series of international exhibitions and commissions.

Retrospective surveys of his work have been presented at Gallery Oldham in 2006 and Fondazione Stelline, Milan in 2010.

Recent projects include curating the exhibition Axis: London Milano for Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan with Claudia De Grandi and a prize winning immersive installation Riverside Suites at the Lowry Hotel, Manchester in collaboration with the designer Veronica Givone and AFK Architects.

His work was featured in the 2017 Southampton City Art Gallery exhibition and book, Capture the Castle, showing landscape artists from Turner to the present day.

2018 saw the presentation of two major commissions Not Dark Yet for the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg and Prague Suite for Intercontinental in Prague.

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Rørvig study I 2019 Oils on canvas, 30x60cm

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Published on the occasion of the exhibition ALAN RANKLE : MOTHLAND Curated by CLAUDIA DE GRANDI PROJECT SPACE BERMONDSEY 10–21 September 2019

Alan Rankle and Claudia De Grandi would like to thank the lenders to the exhibition: Ken and Irene Hazell Mitchell Binks Christine Laing Philip Bennetts QC Moira and Ed Lukins

In association with MAERZ CONTEMPORARY and P78 EDITIONS Riverfall Press 100 Norman Road St Leonards-on-Sea East Sussex TN38 0EJ Bermondsey Project Space Vellum Building 183–185 Bermondsey Street London SE1 3UW ISBN: 978-1-9161427-1-8 Design: Erica Smith Photography: Tim Nathan and Eddie Knight Texts: © Alan Rankle © Judy Parkinson © Clea H Notar © The Estate of Roger Woods

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Right: Alan Rankle with curator of Mothland, Claudia De Grandi

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Alan Rankle MOTHLAND PAINTINGS & EDITIONS CURATED BY CLAUDIA DE GRANDI

BERMONDSEY PROJECT SPACE 183 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3UW +44 (0) 203 441 51 52 www.project-space.london