Decoy 2001

Six animated sequences on DVD

Decoy was made while jane Prophet was artist in residence at the National Trust property, Blickling Hall for Year Of The Artist and first Installed in the Orangery, to draw attention to the relationship between the work and the landscape design motifs of the gardens and parkland outside. In a subsequent staging Decoy was displayed on two plasma screens that were double hung with 18th & 19th century watercolours from The Laing Gallery’s permanent collection. This emphasized its references to landscape painting.

A screen based digital work reflecting on the politics of landscape, construction and ownership. Drawing on works by painters such as Gainsborough and Poussin as well as the creations of landscape designers Humphry Repton and “Capability” Brown, Decoy consists of a series of animated digital “paintings”, displayed on plasma-screens, in which subtly evolving fractal landscapes are combined with photographic images of the views of the grounds of various country houses

This quintessentially English, Arcadian vista has entered the popular imagination as an embodiment of Nature and the Natural, yet it is almost entirely artificial in its construction. By combining these vistas with evolving simulated landscapes, Prophet unearths the artificiality of each landscape’s past, either by returning the setting to a closer approximation of “wild” nature, or by allowing the viewer to project ahead into the future, according to different growth and planting patterns.

The painterly texture of these sequences, allied to their presentation on a new generation of flat plasma screens, alludes to an English landscape tradition of the picturesque and the sublime, whilst highlighting the capacity of digital technology to create a vision of a landscape entirely
under human control.

CREDITS Commissioned/Curated by Film and Video Umbrella 
Made with support from: East England Arts; The National Trust; Arts Council England; Year Of The Artist; Norwich School of Art and Design; Tyne and Wear Museums