Paul Gough
Drawn to, and drawn from the Edgelands
‘Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged’, many English poets and writers describe the ‘edgeland’ as a set of oddly familiar, yet easily ignored spaces. Neither green field or brown, they are in-between, liminal places, overlooked and undervalued. They have, though, become the wild places on our own doorsteps. Wandering these marginal ‘memoryscapes’ they inform Gough’s vision: former sites of battle, abandoned workings and ancient slagheaps, terrain riddled with trenches and troughs, adits and mineholes, ivoried elm and wild buddleia.
Gough’s paintings and drawings are not representations of any one particular scene. Instead they are accretions of places, spaces, times and seasons collaged on to a single surface; they are sites of both legend and anonymity, places emptied and yet full of emptiness, dis-membered topographies that have had their constituent parts re-membered through the process of drawing.
Along the serrated razor edges of West Penwith, deep inside the quarried coastline of the Purbecks, the bloodied slopes of the Dardanelles Peninsula, the transition from site to sketch, from fact to fiction is an elusive process, best done ‘beneath the threshold of consciousness, and without the intercession of reason’. Gough’s portfolio thrives on disregard, embraces the edgeland, invites us to put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known and see them afresh.