M2 Medway Services Eastbound

This artwork featured in Synthetic Landscapes (2017). 

Edward Chell works across media, making combinations of objects and text and exploring the site specific. His practice is rooted in painting, investigating conflicting storylines within the spatial environment and aiming to capture the collisions between the values and meanings we bring to our experiences of place, with a particular focus on borders and peripheral places that present a form of ‘Terrain Vague’.

Chell’s Soft Estate project explores landscapes that have been made accessible and also transformed by car culture. Seemingly urban in character, paradoxically these motorscapes are fragile, yet extremely self-sustaining and hard environments; changing landscapes that embody both beauty and survival.

Edward Chell’s series of paintings, The Garden of England, draws on the 18th-century English Landscape tradition to investigate the motorway verges of Kent. Tourism, with its roots in early tourist guides by William Gilpin and William Wordsworth, has led to the exploitation and even despoliation of places Wordsworth and others wanted to protect. These paintings were originally exhibited in Little Chef restaurants, a modern equivalent of the network of 18th-Century watering holes that catered for the Grand Tour, with a view to prompting questions about the relationship between our experience of landscape and the ways in which we travel through it.

A series of publications were produced to accompany Chell’s exhibitions, forming part of his artistic practice…

Image: Edward Chell, M2 Medway Services Eastbound, Painting on linen, installation view, Synthetic Landscapes, Weston Park and Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist. 

 

About the artist

Edward Chell

Edward Chell exhibited in The Precious Clay, Museum of Royal Worcester, 2019, and Synthetic Landscapes, Weston Park; Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, 2017.

Image: Edward Chell, Untitled Object I (Sky Tip, St Austell), 2018. Painted euro transport pallet. Courtesy the artist.