Artist Statement

Jonathan S Hooper

My work in landscape arises from the enigmatic moors and margins of my native Cornwall—most vividly the cliff-lines and tors of the North Cornwall as well as the layered archaeology of the county’s ancient and industrial past.

For me, landscape is not backdrop or simply scenery to be passively viewed. Instead landscape is the embodiment of time: unfolding, accumulating, repeating yet always altering. Landscape is not just the immediately apparent physical structures and measurable phenomena, it is also the processes and perceptive filters that create and transform them.

Landscape and time are inseparable through process, and the process that I find most compelling is the irresistible drift of entropy. Often simplified as the irreversible slide from order into chaos, I feel that entropy is better understood as the logic of change and uncertainty—about becoming rather than being. Its immutability, its inevitability, might even allow it to be characterised as the movement towards perfect form.

We hold an uneasy relationship with time and entropy. We see time as depletion, entropy as decay, and we resist them through agriculture, extraction, and industry—pursuits that, counterintuitively, often create the existential peril we seek to obviate. It is my belief that we must reframe these relationships perhaps seeing the products of entropy—disorder, erosion, disintegration— as the generative matter of creation and evolution: the embodiment of the perpetual cycle of making and remaking.

Landscape painting can play a part in this reframing. Landscape mirrors our own existence: fragile, unstable, finite, yet charged with potential. It is both the record and the medium of transformation.

It could be argued that my practice aligns with a post-structuralist, even Deleuzian framework. French philosopher and theorist Gilles Deleuze rejected fixed, static structures in favour of a dynamic understanding of reality—difference over identity with repetition as the revelation of difference, or in terms previously suggested, becoming over being.

In this spirit, my work is shaped by seriality and improvisation. I return to particular, familiar locations and iterate around them, letting shifting variables—weather, memory, light, perception—layer, resonate and interfere like waves of information, both tangible and intangible.

Layering is central to my process. Paint is applied, removed, and abraded with tools both devised and improvised. Wet-on-wet techniques allow pigments to sink and mingle on the surface. These gestures mirror the natural processes of landscape formation, while also embodying the accumulation of time and memory.

I refer to my works as Edgescapes, not merely for Cornwall’s position at the edge of things, its history of looking out, but more because I regard limits as starting points, places of revelation. These are zones of uncertainty where equations break down and we are left to our own devices; perilous and unnerving perhaps but loaded with possibility; the points beyond which we only have imagination.

Landscape itself has no inherent boundaries; it is infinitely scaleable. How we frame it is entirely choice and convention.In leaving the margins of my paintings, in terms, “unfinished,” I am suggesting the transitional, contingent nature of edges—that the limits of representation are always provisional and should be susceptible to change. These “unfinished” edges are an affirmation of the painting process- they reveal the layers of construction, the underlying geology of the painting.

Through these methods- and the development of my theoretical concepts of Tuned Space 1and Waveism2- I seek to challenge established preconceptions of landscape representation, dissolving distinctions between land, sea, and air; between form and experience. In doing so I seek to coalesce the physical with the metaphysical and to compress these multi-dimensional phenomena onto a 2-dimensional surface.

My work is neither activism nor instruction. At best it is a catalyst—an invitation to apprehend landscape as the complex matrix in which we live. To see ourselves as immanent in landscape is to foster a more mutual, interconnected engagement, one that may illuminate not only the sublime, but also the fundamental questions of existence.

As Guardian Review editor Nicholas Wroe wrote in his essay in support of a recent solo exhibition “In Landscape” : “Hooper’s art, abstract yet tangibly located, combines painting’s unique trilogy of colour, form and surface to produce deeply satisfying evocations of place and time….underpinned by robust theoretical thinking...intensity of observation...A specific subject becomes a universal object.”

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1. I conceive of landscape as an amalgam of Tuned Spaces; spaces- perhaps particular to the individual- that resonate with inputs that are physical, sensory/experiential and metaphysical; inputs that operate across the full spectrum of time, from the epochal to the evanescent. These are spaces that exist in actuality but also in memory and through the filters of exile. They are identifiable but impermanent, their tuning modulating with and without us, through time; they are not static.

2. Waveism proposes that waves, rather than hard particles, are the key foundational, universal constituents; that the physical manifestation and the nomenclature of waves, and wave theory, are fundamental not just as measurable phenomena but also as metaphorical devices. Waves are continua and, as such, consistent with my abiding interest in the analogue.