Ruin Lust at the Tate Britain

The first room in the Ruin Lust exhibition at the Tate Britain was sparsely populated with paintings. But each provided a key to themes which would be explored in subsequent rooms. They also gave some idea as to the range of subject matter, style and historical span which we could expect. John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum confronted us with the process of ruination in full epic widescreen. As in any disaster film, the pleasurable terrors of natural cataclysm visited upon the grand edifices of human civilisation in its fullest flowering are gleefully exploited. Figures fleeing in the foreground are overwhelmed by the rivers of bubbling magma and furious rain of burning rock plummeting from the sky. Even tinier figures in the middle distance have probably had it, no-name extras hired to scream and be anonymously buried or swallowed up by the roiling and rifting landscape.

This aestheticisation of disaster, offered up as thrilling spectacle, is later reflected upon in the dark photographic prints of Tacita Dean. The title of the series included here, The Russian Ending, directly invokes the cinematic quality of such images. It refers to the alternate cuts of films which distributors produced for Finnish and Russian markets. The latter emphasised more fatalistic, doom-laden conclusions, which they evidently thought would suit the Russian mindset. Dean’s beautifully reproduced images of shipwrecks, polluted cityscapes, battlefields strewn with the shells of bombed out vehicles and, indeed, erupting volcanoes are shaded in a sooty chiaroscuro, as if they were ingrained with smoke and ashes. Scrawled descriptions over various elements of the scene add to the impression that these are directed disasters, carefully staged and photographed for the pleasure of the viewer.

Rachel Whiteread also capture the moment of destruction, of ruination, in her series of photographs of high-rise estates being detonated. The titles include lengthy addresses, including postcodes. There are shots of the buildings in an intact state at the time at which they were condemned. They are like pre-ruins, the undocumented time inbetween a steady decline towards final dramatic collapse in dynamite clap and brick dust cloud.

Back in the introductory atrium, Jane and Louise Wilson’s Azeville (2006) and The Aftermath are large black photographs in which massive concrete bunkers, remnants of wars and occupations, fill the frame with brooding, ominous intensity. They are linear cliffs and outcrops, geometrically sheared formations which seem to form new landscape features. The incursions of nature into these man-made structures, in the guise of weathering, the drifting of sand, the mottling of moss and lichen, and the fringing of grass and weeds, begins to blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. They are like blocks of frozen time, deposits left by a particular historical moment. Despite their apparent indestructible solidity, they are themselves subject, as is everything, to the processes of time.

Paul Nash - Equivalents for Megaliths

Other artists also explore the congruence of the natural landscape with monumental human constructions. The works in the section titled On Land (presumably a reference to Brian Eno’s ambient evocation of fogbound landscapes) conjure up the spirit of place, the absorption of the marks of human history and presence into the contours of the land. Such marks respond to the landscape even as they shape it. Nature always triumphs in the end, steadily growing over and covering human endeavours to hold the cyclical processes of growth and decay at bay. Ruin and disaster create a borderland in which civilisation and the wild reconnect with each other amongst the rubble. The ancient landscapes of the south are invoked in Paul Nash’s Equivalents for Megaliths and Pillar and Moon. The surreal transformation of the harvest fields in the former suggests and affinity between the human imagination and certain landscapes, a profound sense of connection and attachment. Megalithic stone is here replaced with less substantial grids and rolls, suggestive of geometrical harvest stacks. They look like ideal forms, plans waiting to be given substance with the appropriate material. They are templates for the shapes and objects appropriate for a particular place and time, whether that be harvest stacks or sarsen stones. The harvested shapes will decay much more quickly, or be summarily dismantled. Time for these equivalents is considerably more constricted. The stone globe topping the wall pillar in the latter painting echoes the moon’s sphere in the sky above. The built landscape and the natural cycles are linked, the ruinous processes of time once more invoked. Time is inherent in both paintings: seasonal time, historical time and geological time. Megalithic sites have become so much a part of the British landscape, permanently inscribed onto the contours of OS maps, that they appear as an expression of it; Ruins which have come to seem like expressive natural outcroppings of the land.

Joe Tilson also uses the ancient landscape of southern Britain as the basis of his Wessex Portfolio series. With their stacked arrays of photographs and graphic images, associatively linking into boldly iconographic representations of Stonehenge, Cerne Abbas, Silbury Hill, the White Horse of Uffington, Avebury and Glastonbury, these attempt to codify the power of these sites. Details such as spiral patterns (the inwardly coiling pathways of the brain), sketches of archaeological finds, starry backdrops and drawings of moths and bees give a particularity which contrasts with the specific view, focussing inward or beyond and bringing individual vision or universal perspective to bear. As a whole, they offer some kind of diagrammatic distillation of the affective spell of these places. They have gone beyond the notion of the ruin and have become part of a collective inner landscape, one where the distinction between the natural and the artificial has been almost wholly dispelled.

Paul Nash - The Fertile Image (with Monster Field on the cover)

Paul Nash further explores the surreal quality of the southern English landscape, and the presence of man within it, in a series of his photographs included here (some of which were also published in his 1951 book Fertile Image). Human artefacts and tools become strange and purposelessly abstract when stranded and abandoned within natural surrounds, or within wilds which have grown up around them. They become markers of boundary zones between the wild and the domestic, exterior and interior worlds. Iron Post, Bedhead and Stone Wall in particular points to the borders of unconscious dreamworlds with its particular assemblage. A garden roller is a potent symbol in its ruinous, rusted state. A tool intended to control and tame wild nature, it is now subject to its erosive forces. Nash’s fallen tree monsters indicate the ways in which ruinous natural forms arouse the active and alert imagination.

John Sell Cotman - Llanthony Abbey

Paintings of picturesque ruin often fixed upon the shattered shells of monasteries as their objects of fascination. Llanthony Abbey in Wales, set with a lush river valley, was a particular favourite, and views by Turner, John Sell Cottman and Joseph Clarendon Smith were included here. Leafy branch and vine cover patches of crumbling masonry, both furthering its eventual disintegration and helping in the short term to bind sections of wall together. The passage of time and history is made manifest and the irrevocable triumph of nature over civilisation is evoked. Abbeys were subject to deliberate ruination during the Reformation, and stand as symbols of the fragility of human ideas, beliefs and social and political structures. No matter how fixed and unassailable they might appear at any given moment, they will eventually fall.

Elswhere, the idea of the picturesque and the mystical sense of identity attached to the British landscape, along with the dreamy and uncritical veneration which it can arouse, are satirised. Keith Arnatt uses the acronym AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) with maximal irony in his series of photographs from 1982-4. He studiously avoids picturesque scenes, seeking out what lies behind or just beyond such carefully framed compositions. The workings behind the stage sets, so to speak. His countryside is grubbily mundane and poverty-worn. Human incursions into the natural world are not depicted as harmonious or romantic. They are despoliations, falling into a ruinous and rubbish strewn state which no one is likely to linger and admire.

John Latham’s Five Sisters Bing (1976) is a highly artificial landscape whose pyramidally peaked mountain range is formed of leather-bound books whose covers are redolent of classic literature, and whose bedrock is a bound edition of a year’s copies of The Times. An establishment landscape to be imposed on the spoil mountains left by departed industry. The very idea of a monument, for which this was a proposal, is mocked, the motives for its construction viewed with the greatest suspicion. David Shrigley, meanwhile, erects an instant prefab mini-leisure centre on the site of demolished Victorian housing, an amusing satire on reflexive 'redevelopment'. There is a serious point beneath the surface titters. Organised leisure will be the new currency in this street where people once organised their own communal activities.

Graham Sutherland - Devastation 1941: East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse

War is a time of rupture and upheaval, and creates its own instant overnight ruins. The shock of familiar buildings and cityscapes transformed with such sudden violence provokes an effect of surreal dislocation. British artists of a surrealist bent adapted their eye for strange and psychologically resonant transformations and realignments of the normal world and trained it on scenes in which that safe normality had been savagely blown apart. Surrealism during wartime becomes closer to realism, the surrealist’s attraction towards destruction guiltily fulfilled. Graham Sutherland, in his Devastation 1941: East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse, finds his characteristic fusion of natural and mechanical forms in the exposed rolls of paper. Stacked on top of one another and exposed to the elements, they look like the stripped trunks of felled trees mournfully laid out amongst broken machinery. In Muirhead Bone’s Torpedoed Oil Tanker (1940), the gargantuan vessel resembles a beached leviathan, the efflorescent rent in the side a killing wound. Metal has been bent and flayed, peeled back like hard, leathery skin. In John Armstrong’s Coggeshall Church, Essex (1940), bomb damage to the tower has revealed a structural cross-section, as if we were looking at an architectural illustration. The damage here is very neat and precise. It could almost be a part of an act of reconstruction rather than destruction. John Piper’s St Mary le Port, Bristol records the jagged masonry bones of one of the city’s churches in much the same way as he painted the ruins of country mansions. Another Paul Nash photograph, taken at the Cowley Dump in Oxfordshire in 1940, gazes upon a cresting slope of wrecked airplane husks and dismembered parts. It form the basis for what is probably his best-known Second World War painting, which found him in full-blown surrealist mode: Totes Meer (Dead Sea) of 1941. The jumbled assemblage of aircraft parts displays an angular modernist fragmentation, here recorded as observed reality rather than formal abstraction, however. It looks like the result of a monstrous collision. The twisted metal precariously piled up in grinding disarray is darkly radiant with the violent spirit of death and destruction; that of the planes, their crews and of the destruction which they in turn had wrought. It is an instant, discomforting and unheroic monument.

John Constable - Sketch for Hadleigh Castle

The last of the introductory pictures in the exhibition’s atrium was John Constable’s Sketch for Hadleigh Castle. The ruin here is stridently Romantic, a lonely tower under rainswept skies by a storm-troubled sea. The unfinished nature of the picture gives it a rough form which proves entirely apposite for the mood of the scene. Though never intended to be viewed as a work in itself, it is nevertheless unconsciously modern in approach. It anticipates the way in which other works in the exhibition convey a ruinous aspect through rough, unrefined form; compositions left deliberately ragged around the edges, dissolving or thickening into semi-abstraction. JMW Turner also anticipates modern styles in his watercolour study Holy Island Cathedral. The ruined arch emerges from hazy and watery blue surrounds like some sunken Ys rising from the depths. We can imagine the picture accompanied by the tolling of Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie. Turner’s Temple of Poseidon is another Romantic clifftop ruin of the imagination. Its tempestuous roughness and noisy drama, with violent clouds gathering, stabbed through by a gash of lightning, has none of the classical equanimity its title might suggest. The gathering storm suggests that the process of ruination is ongoing, and the dogs howling out across the building waves mourn for their lost master.

JMW Turner - Holy Island

John Piper’s paintings of dilapidated country houses often have the look of collages, or broadly outlined stage sets. Flat masses of masonry facades are set off against highly contrasted backgrounds, the muted or darkly burnished colours suggesting burnt surfaces or age-accumulated patinas of lichen or moss. They are evocative backdrops in front of which stylised and fancifully costumed masques seem designed to unfold. The Forum (1961) sees him adopting the subject matter of the classical Roman ruin. He pushes the composition towards abstraction with splashes, dabs, dashed strokes and tangles of scraped swirl. Shapes suggestive of classical architectural form rise from or are imposed upon this chaos, remains of the old city amongst rubble and scrubby growth.

Leon Kossoff - Demolition of the Old House Dalston Road 1974

Leon Kossoff’s Demolition of the Old House Dalston Road 1974 is almost topographical in its roughness of form. Paint is built up in thick layers like dried ridges of mud. The picture could almost have been created from the mixed dust and debris of the site it depicts. Scores in the paint further the sense of geological formations, resembling weather cracking beginning to shear and fragment the surface. It’s a cousin to Frank Auerbach’s Maples Demolition Euston Road, painted in 1960, and which employs a similarly thick layering of paint to create a gnarled and glutinous dimensionality. Laura Oldfield Ford’s meticulously drafted depictions of post-war housing estates and their boundaries are smeared with blurred washes of pink in what at first appears a deliberate act of vandalism. These translucent surface blemishes resemble marks of attempted erasure, the traces left on walls after graffiti has been washed off. But scrawled screeds stubbornly remain written across areas of the paintings, commentaries, observations and clouds of drifting thought and emotion made manifest. The writing on the paintings is not defacement, rather it is an attempt at giving the local spirit expression.

In the case of Tacita Dean’s film Kodak, the medium is in itself the substance of ruin, or of the abandonment which presages ruin. It documents an ending, a moment of historical and cultural transition. These are the final days of the Kodak film manufacturing plant, and part of Dean’s film is printed on the last black and white 16mm stock to be produced there. It thus becomes a record of its own obsolescence and disappearance, a last spectral testament. The beauty of the images make this a melancholy farewell, an elegy to the passing of a particular form of vision from the world.

Piranesi - Pyramid of Gaius Cestius

The first pictures greeting the visitor as they entered the main body of the exhibition weren’t by British artists, and therefore seemed set a little apart. They were essentially more introductory works, prefatory images which primed us further for what was to come. They were two of Piranesi’s prints of Rome. They were placed by the entrance to the first room because of their formative influence on the development of an aesthetic appreciation of ruins. The 18th century Views of Rome depict the classical buildings in a detailed and clearly delineated fashion, outlines boldly etched and impressed on the paper with black ink. They bring a sense of solidity to the cracked, crumbling and vine-blotched masses of the Colosseum (1760-78) and the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius (1755). A degree of classical order and proportion is maintained, but tempered with the disorder of ruination and the reintroduction of a nature formerly held firmly at bay. There is a state of balance in place, but it is temporary. The Piranesi etchings set the templates for visions of cities and civilisations decaying and passing away, leaving evocatively empty shells to spark the curiosity of future travellers who look upon them.

Gustave Doré - The New Zealander

There was a subset of pictures here which imagined the abandoned ruins of futurity. These are the cityscapes of post-catastrophe science fiction which have fascinated writers, artists and, latterly, film-makers from the Romantic period onwards. In 1872, Gustave Doré provided dark and richly atmospheric engravings for London: A Pilgrimage, a travel book written by Blanchard Jerrold. The final plate is called The New Zealander. It depicts the future wanderer seated on a chunk of masonry from the collapsed London Bridge on the south side of the river, looking across at the ruins of the city. The dome of St Paul’s has collapsed inward; the cracked or fallen dome is a commonplace in depictions of future ruin. As an overarching symbol of ordered and classical civilisation and achievement, it is the perfect subject for significant destruction and continued disrepair. Jerrold locates the source of the imaginary scene in ‘Macaulay’s dream of the far future, with the tourist New Zealander upon the broken parapets, contemplating something matching “the glory that was Greece – the grandeur that was Rome”’. Thomas ‘Lord’ Macaulay’s quote about the New Zealander was instantly familiar to many at the time. At the conclusion to a book review in an 1840 edition of the Edinburgh Review, he had contemplated the continuation of Roman civilisation (the book in question was a History of the Popes) and the fall of the post-Reformation English protestant society. It was in such a context that he dreamed of a time when ‘some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's'. It was an image which caught the imagination of the reading public, long after the substance of the review was forgotten, and was widely, even profligately cited. The New Zealander became a byword for a future observer of fallen London. Doré’s print looked forward to look back to Piranesi’s etchings of Rome.

Joseph Michael Gandy - An Imagined View of the Bank of England in Ruins

Future ruination or abandonment became a part of a number of works of fiction in the 19th century as the industrialised city exploded outward and swallowed people up wholesale with a smoky belch. There was an element of wish-fulfilment in Richard Jeffries’ After London, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, William Morris’ News from Nowhere, H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine (with its emblematic scene set in a crumbling future museum), and M.P.Shiel’s 1901 novel The Purple Cloud. The destruction of the new polluted, overpopulated cities offered the possibility of new beginnings, the envisaging of a wholesale change of direction. When the architect John Soane designed his classically solid and rational Bank of England buildings, he commissioned the artist Joseph Gandy to depict them as future ruins, his domes and ceilings cracked and holed, letting in the elements to complete the levelling. It was an act of humility in a profession which can easily breed megalomaniac vision and vaulted hubris. But it also acknowledged the impermanence of the civilisation for which this symbolically massive and imposing structure served as a modern temple. This too shall pass, he seems to be saying, as the same time recognising the transience of his existence and the eventual disappearance of all the ideas and endeavours which made up and gave purpose to his lifetime. Perhaps it was this melancholy awareness that led him to collect, hoard and catalogue so many pieces of ruined masonry and statuary. He filled every nook and purpose-built shelf of his London house with them until he was effectively living in a crowded museum of his own curation. The house really is a museum now, and an utterly bewitching one at that, particularly as dusk draws in.

James Boswell - The Fall of London: The Horseguard

James Boswell’s The Fall of London (1933) is a series of smokily smudged black and white lithographs depicting the fight for the city during a fascist invasion. It gives alarming substance to the fears (or for some, the hopes) arising from the spread of fascism across the continent. They are a contemporary variant on the tales of German invasion which were widespread during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, the best known of which is George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking. A collection of these stories was gathered together by Michael Moorcock in the 1977 anthology England Invaded, which includes Blyde Mudersnook’s 1911 Strand tale When the New Zealander Comes – a fulfilment of Macaulay’s prophetic imagining. Boswell’s stark, graphically striking images are startling bleak. Human beings are reduced to ragdoll figures cast broken-limbed onto piles of rubble or hung crook-necked from lampposts, scuttling, crablike creatures in armoured carapaces, pointed guns like gesticulating claws, or fearful shadow runners, hunched, tensed and showing a flash of a face alert with blank paranoia. They are vaguely reminiscent of David Lloyd’s artwork for Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (the monochrome version as originally published in Warrior comic), for which these lithographs could be viewed as a prelude in 8 snapshots.

Visions of the future themselves become outmoded and redundant, and looking back on them is like contemplating the ruins of futures past. This is what Gerard Byrne does in his video piece 1984 and Beyond, which restages a 1963 discussion between 12 science fiction writers, the results of which were published in Playboy. They attempted between them to envisage possible futures. The writers involved were among the cream of the 50s generation who prided themselves on their awareness of the social and political currents of the time. They were pulp philosophers possessed of varying degrees of insight. Some of their ideas are interesting, some are definitely of their time. The writers in question were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, William Tenn, A.E.Van Vogt, Algis Budrys, Theodore Sturgeon (one of the more liberal members of this group), Frederik Pohl, Rod Serling (the Twilight Zone writer and producer), James Blish (who had a rare intellectual rigour) and Poul Anderson. There is a faded nostalgia inherent in such a resurrection of old dreams. A yearning ache for a time when the future was an exciting prospect, full of rapidly expanding and seemingly limitless utopian potential; a future which could be born from the minds of a convocation of pipe smoking science fiction writers.

The works in the final room, Cities in Dust, drive the nails into the coffin of any such post-war utopian dreams of shining ziggurats and coiling skyways. John Riddy’s London (Weston Street) from 2008 focuses on an expanse of brickwork under a railway bridge. It seems to contain a chronicle of London’s steady decay from the mid-Victorian era onwards, written in the gradations of grime, weathering and mould, as accurately decipherable as the rings in a tree or the strata on an exposed rockface. The agit-prop art group Inventory find the decline of post-war social ideals symbolised by the worn, peeling surface of a South London housing estate map sign. They wrote their own response onto it, an angry palimpsest decrying the neglect which the ruinous map charts. Jon Savage’s Uninhabited London photos, taken between 1977-2008, view the city as a depopulated zone, abandoned by its populace, or perhaps evacuated by official mandate. It is devoid of apparent life. If there are people here, they have retreated behind their walls and are peering anxiously between the gaps in the curtains, like the protagonist in Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor. It’s a post-punk vision of future catastrophe now, with the city as imagined by Derek Jarman in Jubilee or by Michael Moorcock in various Jerry Cornelius stories.

Keith Coventry - Heygate Estate

Keith Coventry’s Heygate Estate (1995) redesigns the estate map as a piece of Russian constructivism, echoing the suprematist extremes of cold abstraction to which Kazimir Malevich pushed his paintings. It plots the birth and death of modernist ideals and approaches. There is an implicit criticism of the way in which human social and individual needs were abstracted and compacted to fit the mass housing projects of the post-war period. Just as the idealism of the Russian revolution descended into totalitarian control, so the ideals of modernist housing plans and their attendant social programs tended to devolve into failing systems of control. Coventry’s work serves as a fitting end point for the exhibition. The representations of ruins we have seen have largely been palpably physical. But ruins can equally be the rubble and wreckage of ideals, philosophies and once firmly held worldviews. The salutary lesson of the ruin is that nothing lasts, all is transient. It’s a knowledge which is melancholic, but which can also offer great comfort. Everything changes, everything is renewed. In this realisation lies the curious pleasure, lustful or not, of the ruin.

Soft Estate at the Spacex Gallery

Artist and academic Edward Chell has gathered together a motley band of explorers for the new Spacex Gallery exhibition Soft Estate. They are all set on venturing into the seemingly blank and barren spaces of urban edgelands and interstitial no-places, intent on unearthing unexpected riches and neglected histories from what at first glance might seem unpromising terrain. By focussing on the wildernesses of the automotive landscape and the monumental ruins of the modernist era, the exhibition positions itself at one end of a continuum which connects it with historical artistic and aesthetic tastes and moods. It’s notable that one of the artists here, Laura Oldfield Ford, also has work in the Tate Britain Ruin Lust show. Her pictures there are ambivalently placed in the Pleasure of Ruins section, near to watercolours of ruined abbeys by JMW Turner and John Sell Cotman, and parallel with John Piper’s large, semi-abstract 1961 painting The Forum. Perhaps significantly, her paintings of battered grey estates and portraits of their inhabitants are placed directly opposite Joseph Gandy’s hovering view of John Soane’s new Bank of England plans depicted, at the request of the architect, as future ruins.

Edward Chell’s own work sprouts up throughout the exhibition, like the hardy weeds and scrubland plants which he celebrates. This is the unglamorous species of vegetation which goes unprized, and is uprooted when it strays into land cultivated by cursing gardeners. But it is resilient and indicative of the profligacy of nature, its stubborn insistence on adapting to and colonising any environment, no matter how inhospitable. Chell’s work is concerned with the artificial landscapes created by man to accommodate the car economy. He is fascinated by the new possibilities this has afforded for nature to flourish in areas hostile to human presence. This principally means motorway verges. The title which he has chosen, Soft Estate, is a term which refers to such spaces. It recognises that they have become distinct habitats fostering a surprising variety of life.

Chell makes ironic play with the proximity of a uniform, mechanised and ruthlessly functional manufactured landscape, seemingly intent on sealing inconvenient nature beneath a hard coating, and the plant species which go wholly unnoticed by those speeding past in their aluminium and moulded plastic pods. Mantel Piece (2013) arranges a varied array of highly polished silencer boxes from the underbellies of cars end up, moulded onto stands. The open ends of connecting pipes give access to the hollow interior like the narrow mouths of flower vases. On the flat sides, silhouettes of tough, straggly plants are etched, giving them a sense of permanence and indestructibility.

This impression is further created in works displayed in the smaller upper gallery. Eclipse (2013) covers the wall with evenly spaced square plaques, which are lacquered to give them a hard reflective shine and make them look like Chinese porcelain. The outlines of plants found on motorway verges are painted onto the surface of the plaque, and the whole looks like a taxonomical collection, pressed into lifeless, memorialised permanence beneath the translucent varnish. Three large drawings on rough-edged paper use dust gathered from motorway verges as the basis for mixing together a new graphic medium. This is used to create more silhouettes of hardy roadside plants. The means of producing the pictures points to the impermanence of the hard manufactured hide layered onto the surface of the world by human agency, which is subject to the same forces of erosion as anything else on the planet. It will, in its turn, break up and be ground down to become part of the topsoil in which vegetable life will establish itself in its own slow time. The glowing granular gold with which these silhouettes are filled suggests an alchemical process, the base material of the motorway transformed into irrepressible, outspreading life. The large scale on which these plants, generally considered unworthy of attention, are rendered gives them a noble, heraldic aspect. Michael Landy has similarly rendered weeds and wasteground plants with a fine art precision. By the very effort expended and attention granted, this lends them a new and magnified importance, directing our attention to the neglected and disdained in the world at large.

Chell’s four large paintings in the main gallery also make a significant link between the medium and the subject matter. These depictions of motorway verges, with flowering banks filling the foreground and most of the frame, are finely detailed in buttery yellow oil paints. These are daubed onto a smoothly reflective surface of shellac, rolled out over the linen field of the canvas below, which provides a dark contrast to these two-tone compositions. This hard shellac surface echoes that of the built-up motorway environment depicted. But the main focus of the pictures, as mentioned, are the verges, which glow with a flowering yellow radiance, a soft surface which belies the brittle, chitinous backdrop upon which it lies. There is no sign of human presence in these pictures. The overexposed, bleached light hints at an intense solar radiation, the burning glare of a post-human future, or one in which humanity has been forced from the surface of the world. The spirit of JG Ballard inhabits these depopulated concrete and tarmac landscapes. Their linear regularity, softened by nature’s incursions, are suggestive of inner topographies in which all inessentials have been pared away. Ballard’s presiding spirit hovers throughout the exhibition, in fact. The clipped psychogeographical musings of Iain Sinclair (particularly in London Orbital) and the wanderings of Robinson in Patrick Keiller’s films are further literary and cinematic satellites orbiting the work here.

Other literary and artistic precedents and pointers are invoked by Chell more directly. William Gilpin, John Ruskin and William Wordsworth are given their own personalised custom car plates. Some kind of progression in the aesthetic view of the ideal landscape is traced in this roll call of worthies, and the manner in which they are presented. Gilpin formulated the notion of the Picturesque in the late 18th century. This moved away from the rigorous formality and order of classical landscapes, which martialled landscape features into carefully controlled patterns. Gilpin’s idea of the aesthetically pleasing landscape incorporated rougher, less linear and symmetrical natural forms (deciduous trees, for example). But it was still controlled and made hospitable to the presence of the human wanderer, if only through the careful framing and placement of the individual elements. Nature was subtly altered and improved upon.

Ruskin played a key role as a critic in the development of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. This drew upon the Picturesque, but emphasized the more rugged elements. In its valorisation of the sublime, the mountainous, cavernous and chasmic, and the pleasurable terrors they inspired, it also set the individual against their surroundings rather than placing them comfortably within them. The landscape and its attendant weather became something against which to test the heroic soul. Wordsworth stands for the literary side of the movement. He is another bridging figure, developing the Romantic worldview in his poetry from the Picturesque tastes which preceded it. Both movements, and the work which they gave rise to, still exert a powerful influence on the way we think of landscape and nature, and what we find beautiful in them, to this day.

The different styles of lettering on the car plates symbolise changing tastes over time. They also draw parallels between the modern car culture, which has transformed the landscape physically and in the way we see it (generally framed in a windscreen or window), and the 18th and 19th century worlds in which these aesthetic viewpoints arose. Gilpin travelled in horse-drawn coach on his picturesque tours of England, at a pace which made discoveries of special places all the more pleasurable. Wordsworth could write about he coming of the railways and the steam age in his 1833 poem Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways, not without a certain measured optimism, or at least philosophical acceptance. Ruskin wholly rejected industrialisation in his later life, yearning for a return to human craftsmanship rather than machine manufacture. But his promotion and approval of the Gothic revival as the appropriate architectural style for the age certainly had its effect on the look of the world the rapidly spreading railways made. The car plates look forward from this world to one in which pre- and post-war Shell Guides pointed the way to Picturesque and Romantic views, with accompanying illustrations by some of the prominent English landscape artists of the time such as Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Graham Sutherland.

Chell further explores this link with more signs on the walls. These can be found in parts of the gallery not generally used for showing art – the inbetween places which the visitor usually walks obliviously through. Chell thus reflects the theme of the exhibition in the very manner of its display. His signs are even put up on the outside walls of the Spacex, originally competing with brightly coloured bill posters declaring Luke Haines Is Coming (he isn’t any more, alas). The aluminium plates use the blue background with white borders and the lettering which are the uniform graphic style of motorway signs. They employ the same reflective materials which make the message stand out with optimum visibility at a distance. Rather than distances or directions, however, these signs offer outlines of flowering verge plants (hemlock, ragwort and lady’s bedstraw), making roadside icons of them. These bring to mind the sign which Patrick Keiller keeps returning to in his film Robinson in Ruins, zooming in to pick out the detail of lichen which adds its own congruent element to the overall pattern. Another sign frames lines taken from a recent variant on Romantic nature poetry by Andrew Taylor, which is subjected to a modernist fragmentation of the regular metre. The instantly recognisable blue of the signs contrasts well with the red brick in which they are set. It was a good idea to have the exhibition spreading out to the exterior of the gallery like this. Unfortunately, it does have its hazards, and Songbird, the sign with the poem, appears to have been nicked.

Other artists respond to the idea of urban edgelands and automotive landscapes in varying ways, which contrast with each other in a stimulating and thought-provoking manner. In the lobby, several of Simon Woolham’s drawings and lithographs are hung, their white surfaces illuminated by the sun which pours through the windows in the mid-morning and early afternoon. These are like obsessive and very precisely scribbled doodles, tightly compacted and clearly delineated around the edges. They seem to depict mazes, pens and tunnels, confining structures and boundaries. To various degrees, these structures have begun to unravel in certain parts, as if worn by age, or pulled apart and kicked in. A ‘pop up’ book contains more of these expressive no-places, although the pop-ups and cut-outs seem to offer no ingenious structural delights or surprises rising from the page at you. They don’t pop up at all. The accompanying text evokes the world of enervated teenagers, boredom alleviated by sullen vandalism and ‘shagging’. The language and behaviour is vicious, wild and nihilistic. These are deserted borderlands which have been turned into occupied territories, in between spaces for in between ages. They are half reconstructed (with the cuts of superimposition still evident) through imagination and memory (which always leaves ragged, unfinished edges). There is presumably some irony intended in the requirement to don white gloves to turn the pages of Woolham’s book – another example of fine art techniques and associations lending nobility to the legions of the disdained and overlooked.

George Shaw also depicts the worlds of childhood estates where he grew up in his paintings, drawings and lithographs of the estates in the Coventry suburbs where he grew up. It’s the lithographs which are on display here. I first saw a number of them in an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge alongside the Michael Landy ‘weed’ prints mentioned earlier. They show the borderlands where the built environment abuts areas of scrubby nature. It’s a messy, ill-defined boundary zone, with rectilinear and organic shapes and forms thrown into unplanned proximity, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not. This could be seen as the incursion of a now shabby Picturesque into human territory, or as the pushing back of the Picturesque by the expansion of dense human habitation. In The Birthday (2012), a stand of trees gathers in the shade at the edge of a block of sunlit white buildings. I seems as if they are looking on, poised to shuffle a bit further inwards during the night, when nobody is watching.

Either way, incursion or pushing back, these are uneasy spaces. The Picturesque is no longer a comfortable, pleasurable place to inhabit or look upon. The absence of human presence becomes inherently threatening. A path curves like a stream towards the black cave mouth of an underpass. The title of the picture, The Gamble (2012) makes explicit the danger which might loiter within. In Playtime (2012), the rope raggedly dangling from an outstretched gibbet arm of a branch looks as if it might be the remains of a noose from which a pendant body has been cut.

Laura Oldfield Ford’s 2011 Walsall Drift series also depicts housing estates, high-rise blocks and their borderlands – canals overshadowed and superceded by flyovers, gaps of horse-gnawed scrubland, motorway footbridges and derelict breweries. Her pictures are, like those of Shaw, filled with inherent violence and despair, voiced in the writing which is scrawled and incised across them. This is a graffiti which is part observation and pyschogeographer’s field notes, part projection of inner states. The words are obscured by smeared washes of pink, the messy traces left by attempts to scrub out graffiti. A similar attempt at erasure surrounds the head of one of the rare human figures found in the exhibition with a bubblegum cloud. He is a man standing with his bicycle beside the motorway footbridge. The disparity between the two modes of transport, and the evident fact that he will have to (or has had to) heave his bike over the bridge, suggests that he is almost as out of joint with his age as Gilpin might be if he slipped through time and found himself riding through the modern Walsall landscape.

In Walsall Drift 4 (Tower Blocks), the graffiti is more profuse. Its surrounding pink miasma fails to occlude the urgency of the story it tells of a woman living in one of the flats, the ‘mother of a bright ten year old’. The reductive delineation of her room’s contents gives a sense of confinement, of having gazed at these furnishings too long and too often. It’s like a modern variant of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic story of domestic mental disintegration, The Yellow Wallpaper. The feeling here are so intense that they leak out like curling smoke, filling the air with half-heard murmurations. There is a fiercely moral aspect to Ford’s pictures. Ruskin, with his insistence upon the necessity for art to have a moral dimension, would have approved of the sentiment, if not necessarily the mode and tenor of its expression. Laura Oldfield Ford’s work is gaining a great deal of recognition this year. She was included in the Ruin Lust show at Tate Britain, and will soon be a part of the British Library’s exhibition Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK.

As previously mentioned, there is a good deal of potential overlap between Soft Estate and the Ruin Lust, the Tate Britain exhibition. Day Bowman and Robert Soden could certainly have been included in the latter. Bowman’s Gasometer 4 (2011) is a large, semi-abstract painting in greys and whites, the barrel shaped form of the subject filling the foreground, as if viewed in looming close-up. The spattered ‘spillage’ of paint is akin to industrial spoil. Two smaller pictures from the 2012 Weymouth/Portland series combine painting and collage, and studiously avoid the attractions of the picturesque offered by the Dorset coastal locales. The Weymouth here is more like the secret militarised landscape portrayed by Joseph Losey in his 1963 Hammer film The Damned. The razor wire topping a security fence is outlined against a fierce orange sky, with explosions of cut-out purple flowers overlaid. Another gasometer is situated in a barren space bordered by chain fence links and blearily burnished by the unsparing sodium glare of night streetlighting. The picture is divided foursquare into discrete sections, which both complement and contrast with each other. Pink campion flowers offer the same defiant intrusion of life into the wasteland as can be found in Edward Chell’s work. A painted border at the bottom resembles a fragment of one of Monet’s water-lily canvases. Both paintings have more paint splatter spoil, and the latter has oily black mug-base rings. These look like they might have been made by barrels leaching some chemical effluent.

Robert Soden paints John Piperesque ruins, the rubble of ‘redevelopment’ sites, often in his native Sunderland. The shattered skeletons of buildings rent by wrecking vehicles and the tangled thickets of their wire and twisted iron frameworks hark back to the Turneresque romance of ruins. For a brief period, the urban space is opened up and the sky revealed, the city afforded a more expansive prospect. The Caretaker’s Hut (1985) is set against a complex foreground of tangled weeds and yellow flowers. The hut itself is painted a dark green, suggesting an affinity with this semi-wild environment, to which its incumbent evidently takes a relaxed attitude as far as trimming and taming is concerned. It bears the hallmarks of a hermit’s hut, a feature of many a Romantic landscape.

The same could be said of Guyhurn Layby Sit In Transport Café (2010), one of the photographs produced by the Caravan Gallery, Jan Williams’ and Chris Teasdale’s gallery housed in, you guessed it, a caravan. A converted blue shipping container is lodged in a bower of bright thistle heads and abundant weeds. A short bridge of steps leads to the entrance. It’s like a monkish cell, an enclosed retreat in the semi-wild borderlands. In No Way Out, Thurrock (2011), a roundabout road sign beneath a concrete overpass shows a broken circle ,with stubby radial arms sticking out at irregular intervals. It looks like a broken wheel, a symbol of stasis and inertia. All directions point to the sprawl of the Lakeside shopping centre. There is no way out, no escape, no possibility of pulling free from its massive gravitational attraction. It’s a picture which brings to mind J.G.Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island, a latter day Robinson Crusoe tale about a man marooned on a small patch of land between stretches of the Westway heading out of London.

Another traffic island can be found in the Caravan Gallery’s photograph The Island of Sheppey (2009). This one is a little less busy. It’s partly a visual pun, but also plays with the ideas of the picturesque and the sublime. A small platform edged with curved curb takes the form of the stereotypical paradise island. Instead of a gently inclined, off-centre palm tree, however, it has a battered and extremely grubby bollard. The island also seems to have drifted into a layby, butting up against the shore of a roadside verge. It serves no apparently useful function. In the background below the Thames estuary spreads out in all its muddily expansive glory. The play on perspective suggested by the title (the traffic island as Sheppey) enlarges the estuary channel to an awe-inspiring scale, elevating it the status of the sublime landscape.

Tesco Superstore, Nottingham or Wherever (2006) offers an alternative view of roadside verges to Edward Chell’s nature reserves. The verge here is the hidden reverse of the automotive consumer society. The picture is taken from a perspective beneath the slope leading down from the sliproad curving into the superstore car park. The grassy incline is covered with a drift of detritus, packaging litter from the instantly consumed food tossed out of car windows. It’s an invisible no-space, out of sight and therefore beyond care or concern. There’s clearly a symbolic dimension to the picture. Behind the wry humour, there’s a moral dimension of which Ruskin would have approved.

John Darwell’s photos from the An Allotted Space series (2013) frame details of allotments in a spare, austere light. The Picturesque or conventionally pleasing is studiously avoided. There are no brightly red tomatoes or impressively bulging marrows here. The only real sign of colour and productive growth we are granted is a small string of red chillies, and they have been discarded on top of a compost heap, as if deemed to exotic for such surroundings. Instead, the emphasis is on the provisional nature of the cultivation of these edgeland spaces. This is like land coaxed into life by pioneers in a new world, or survivors in a harsh post-apocalyptic environment. Conical stacks of dead stalks look like miniature hayricks, bathetically echoing a favourite subject of painters of the idealised pastoral. Darwell seems most interested in the use of the recycled detritus of society in the allotment plots (descendants of the medieval peasant’s strips of land). The plastic bottles, mulching bin bags, buckets, chicken wire, corrugated iron and yoghurt pots which are adapted for a variety of purposes. They take their part in a cautiously optimistic new perspective on the Picturesque; one in which nature and consumerism strike a balance within the bounds of a test environment.

A key component of the Soft Estate exhibition is the sound which pervades all corners of the gallery. The poem outside (whilst it was there) sets a scene in which ‘the air cools (and) distantly I hear the hum of motorway’. This anticipates what we hear inside. Tracking down the source, we have to kneel down on the floor of the small gallery to look at a film on the pocket screen of an iphone. The image is reduced to a distant prospect, and it is the sound which disseminates across space. The rush of wind down the motorway corridor blends with the slipstream woosh of speeding cars. In one of two films, both shot from flowering verges, the cellophane flapping loose from a roadside memorial provides a secondary screen, a plastic veil through which to view the rapidly passing world. Human and vegetable time is contrasted, and we are reminded that Death dwells in Arcadia, too.

An alternate soundtrack can be heard by donning the headphones piled atop the tomblike black plastic block of the TV which is the visual focus of Hind Land (2013), a video and sound installation by Tim Bowditch and Nick Rochowski with Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau. The picture on the screen is a static shot of a concrete bunker, which seems to be contained within this monumental mass. A triangular opening between adjoining spaces lends this subterranean interior a ritualistic aspect – a darkly sacred catacomb. The sounds which fill your head once put the headphones on (which also serve to block out the motorway hum) are suggestive of noisome, chaotic and heavily mechanised activity going on just beyond the stillness of the coolly and symmetrically framed picture. Electronic sputterings, ratcheting clatter and general grinding and shrieking conjure up vast machineries. A sound reminiscent of a heavy stone being cumbersomely dragged across a paved surface creates a gothic ambience. We can assume there may be braziers burning in this adjacent space. Blending in with the sounds of strange industry are traces of human voices. But they are transformed, made strange, metallic and distorted – part of the machinery.

These alternate soundtracks denote the divergent tendencies apparent in the show, the varying positions the artists taken on the spectrum between the sinister and the sublime. The diverse nature and outlook of the work, along with its shared focus, make this a fascinating, stimulating and highly enjoyable exhibition.