Western Morning News (Saturday)
Taking a fresh look at a much loved Cornish valley’s iconic landscape
FRANK RUHRMUND enjoys the current solo exhibition by Kurt Jackson now on at the Jackson Foundation in St Just, Cornwall
Not only one of Cornwall’s leading landscape artists, but surely one of its busiest, when not in his studio or pursuing a theme outdoors somewhere, he is likely to be seen on television or heard on radio, the St Just-based artist Kurt Jackson possesses enviable energy.
A dedicated environmentalist as well as painter, for the past 30 years or so, on and off, he has drawn and painted the Kenidjack valley, but during the past three years he has been looking at it with fresh eyes, ready to explore, to re-engage and to immerse himself thoroughly from top to bottom in the changing seasons in this extraordinary place.
As he says: “Kenidjack is one of those special places that needs no detailed analysis for it to be seen as a powerful location.
“It spills over with natural treasures and dramatic topography, wears its past on its sleeve, and blatantly displays its heritage and signs of past enterprise, while also providing a home for a plethora of wild life.”
Walking around the paintings Kurt Jackson has been inspired to make by the history, geography, topography and the present day state of Kenidjack is the next best thing to actually being there.
I’ve often walked through the scenes he depicts, and they call to mind something the author Frank Baker says in his The Call of Cornwall. Although published in 1976, he writes about the time he spent here in the 1930s. Refusing to name the valley for fear of attracting too many people to it, he writes: “The valley hangs remotely in my memory. A great granite gulf between dense steeps of bracken, bramble and gorse-ridden earth, holding its streamed bed riven boulders from ancient tin mines where montbretias flush to a deeper red as the sun falls. At the end of the valley is a headland towering above the invisible sea. From here, sun-drenched spray drifts into the mist. This is the end of the world. To go further is to go beyond the bulwarks of my native land. Here, Albion ends and begins.” Frank Baker would have loved this show.
Kurt Jackson’s exhibition ‘Kenidjack: A Cornish Valley’ is accompanied by ‘Valley Lives’. A collection of images and artefacts that aims to tell the story of Kenidjack, Tregeseal or Nancherrow Valley, as it has been known at various times in its history. Thanks to the St Just and Pendeen Old Cornwall Society, Geevor Tin Mine Museum, the Holman family, Paul Leggo, Gillian
Hocking, and Doug Luxford, it is a most welcome and absorbing attachment to Kurt Jackson’s show.
For good measure the Jackson Foundation is also presenting ‘Scotland to Sarawak’. An exhibition which could well be subtitled ‘St Just to Sarawak’, it aims to draw attention across the world to the reality of the climate crisis. A collaboration between between various Friends of the Earth, making this the world’s largest grass roots environmental federation, the connection between its groups, not only in an environmental sense but also in a social and political way, offers hope for us all in solving this global problem.
An enjoyable, interesting and important trio of exhibitions that should not be missed. Admission is free, and all three can be seen in the Jackson Foundation, North Row, St Just, until February 26.