Fracture: Modernist Ground, Northern Weather
If traditional landscape offers the comfort of a view, Fracture offers a condition: an ecology of perception in which the Dales—and particularly Penhill and the surrounding limestone country—are not depicted so much as enacted
This essay concerns my body of work ‘Fracture’ which conceives landscape as a sculptural condition in which mass, geology, and material process structure perception itself. Treating paint as both substance and collaborator, the work argues that the sublime of the Dales is apprehended most fully when painting is built rather than depicted.
The sculptural sublime
Fracture is a sustained inquiry into the liminality of perception and the unstable ways in which we locate ourselves within the world. Beginning with the material presence of paint and extending toward the uncertainty of vision, the work asks what it means to belong not to a mapped place but to a sensed and shifting field of becoming. Refusing the certainties of representation, the paintings occupy the interstice between presence and absence, offering fragments, gestures, and chromatic residues through which place slowly emerges.
Where traditional landscape offers the reassurance of a view, Fracture proposes a condition: an ecology of perception in which the Dales, and particularly Penhill with its surrounding limestone country, are not depicted so much as enacted. Paint operates less as vehicle than collaborator, resistant yet generative. Distressed and accreted surfaces, often incorporating limestone dust, open what Gilles Deleuze describes as a zone of indiscernibility, where figure and ground, past and present, material and image dissolve into one another. Within this suspension, perception remains fluid and meaning refuses closure. Fracture thus becomes not catastrophic but generative: a fissure through which the world discloses itself.
Seen against modernist lineages, the project clarifies both its inheritances and its refusals. From Constable’s meteorological empiricism to Cézanne’s dismantling of the unified viewpoint, modern painting repeatedly recast landscape as a problem of seeing rather than a repertory of motifs. If Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire stands as the archetype of a motif used to interrogate perception, Penhill functions here as a contemporary analogue: returned to not for its silhouette but for the way it pressurises pictorial decisions, range and weight, mass and void, fracture and accretion. Yet where Cézanne fractured perception in order to reconcile vision into a new order, Fracture accepts a contemporary irresolution. The image is held open, neither collapsing into description nor evaporating into pure material.
This orientation places the work in dialogue with a post-Greenbergian materialism that insists on paint’s factuality without renouncing image, defending ambiguity as a mode of truth rather than a failure of finish. If modernism pursued truth to materials, Fracture pursues truth to perception’s instability.
Positioned within the context of Northern painters, the project resonates with Sheila Fell, Norman Ackroyd, and Percy Kelly, each of whom grasped landscape as lived weather rather than scenic report. Fell’s Cumbrian canvases provide a powerful precedent in tonal gravitas, where terrain is shaped as much by geology and labour as by light. In her work the human and elemental are co-implicated; farm buildings are not ornaments within nature but structures of endurance. Fracture extends this conviction by allowing weight to migrate from motif to material, limestone charge, bitumen gloss, scumbled oil, so that the ground itself bears the history it images.
Ackroyd renders the British archipelago through etchings of austere concentration. Air, water, and rock are distilled into tonal economies that approach abstraction without surrendering recognisability. Where his bitten plates transform landscape into atmosphere and edge, Fracture asks what occurs when a similar distillation is pursued through constructed surface: not biting copper, but eroding and rebuilding a ground until image precipitates. The objective is analogous, clarity at the threshold of recognition, yet the means remain geological rather than graphic.
Kelly offers a third orientation: an artist of edges, vernacular structures, and insistent line. His dark architectures stabilise place through outline, through the stubborn fact of things. Fracture departs by softening contour into porous seam, yet shares Kelly’s refusal of the picturesque. Where Kelly holds the world with line, these paintings hold it with mass, the sensed pressure of escarpment, cloud-weight, and exposed stone. Together, Fell, Ackroyd, and Kelly frame a Northern modernism defined not by folklore but by structural restraint. Fracture introduces a fourth vector, entropic materiality, pressing depiction toward embodied geology.
Because the Dales are limestone country, the paintings carry that calcium memory into their surfaces. Limestone dust, sieved, slaked, and bound into the paint film, produces a sedimentary ground that is built, abraded, and recommenced. These are not effects but causes. A resistant tooth alters the behaviour of the mark; a porous surface drinks oil, muting chroma and thickening time. The resulting surface remembers process as rock remembers pressure.
Greenberg’s phrase “truth to materials” approaches this condition but remains too frictionless to describe it adequately. The material is not merely honoured; it answers back. Painterly intention encounters the ground’s refusal in a negotiation that keeps the image contingent and alive to accident as intelligence. As Gombrich observed, perception completes from fragments; here the fragments are literal.
Such mass inevitably raises the question of monumentality. Often mistaken for scale, monumentality is better understood, as Henry Moore insisted, as a quality of form, the relation of mass, void, and contour through which even a small sculpture can carry the gravity of a hill. Fracture pursues monumentality as a painterly condition: ranges of value operate as sculptural volume, open forms admit air, and silhouettes read less as scenic outlines than as weathered profiles.
Two aspects of Moore’s thinking prove especially generative. The first is the notion of internal space, the hole understood not as absence but as positive form. Within these paintings, apertures of pale ground or scumbled atmosphere function not as gaps but as sites of force, wind-pass, beck-cut, limestone swallow hole. The second is Moore’s practice of reading natural objects as sculpture. Flint, bone, and stone become lessons in structure. Here the geology of the Dales is approached similarly: Penhill read as counter-mass, traverse, and uplift, while the painting itself is constructed as a small hill, layered, compressed, and fissured.
This equivalence is methodological rather than metaphorical. The picture is constructed rather than filled. Grounds operate as substrata into which subsequent passages key; planes are carved through range and temperature rather than modelled through descriptive light. Edges are not drawn but broken, their energy distributed across zones like the aftershock of a chisel through stone. Cézanne reappears here as technical ancestor, yet where his shifting planes reconciled perception into structure, Fracture allows structure to precede description. Likeness becomes the by-product of organised mass.
Seen in this way, the project is less a landscape undertaking than a proposal about how painting thinks: through accumulation, erasure, pressure, and release, verbs equally at home in the sculptor’s vocabulary. That the Dales serve as motif is therefore congruent rather than incidental. Limestone is a didactic geology, layered, jointed, and repeatedly tested by weather; the paintings adopt the same grammar.
The Dales have long been loved into cliché. The answer is not to renounce their beauty but to reapprehend their elemental condition. In the north, the sublime rarely announces itself through spectacle; it is encountered instead as pressure and exposure, weather moving upon mass, mass enduring weather. Liminal perception meets this subdued sublime with adequate means, suspending the viewer within a tension where matter and image remain dynamically unresolved.
Sculptural responses, whether literal as in Moore’s bronzes or painterly as here, release the landscape from its postcard destiny. They return it to structure and duration, to time made visible in seam and scarp. The hill becomes not what we look at but what we look with: an instrument for thinking form, weight, interval, and the reciprocal making of place and self.
To encounter these works is to be drawn into fracture itself, not as rupture but as the generative condition of perception. Fracture names the moment before recognition, when seeing remains mobile and meaning unsettled. Painting emerges here as a practice of becoming, never fully resolved, always poised at the threshold of disclosure. Place becomes relation rather than record; belonging becomes practice rather than possession.
If Fell gives weight, Ackroyd weather, and Kelly edge, Fracture contributes mass, a Moore-like sense that form may be both stone-true and open to air. Within this equivalence between painting and sculpture lies the central claim: that the sublime landscape of the Dales is most fully apprehended when treated not as a view to be framed but as a form to be built, tested, and endured. Only then is the postcard retired and the elemental restored
Distressed, accreted surfaces—often literally incorporating limestone dust—open what Deleuze calls a zone of indiscernibility, where figure and ground, past and present, material and image dissolve into one another
Grounds are laid not as backgrounds but as sub-strata; subsequent passages key into earlier deposits; planes are carved out with range and temperature rather than modelled with descriptive light
Notes
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 1994), 35–40; cf. Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Athlone, 1987), 263–66.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 263–66.
John House, Constable and the Pursuit of Nature (London: Tate, 1983); Richard Shiff, “Cézanne and the Practice of Painting,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 47–65.
On motif as laboratory, see Meyer Schapiro, “The Apples of Cézanne,” Art News Annual 34 (1966), 54–63.
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960), in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 85–93.
See Cate Haste, Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (London: Lund Humphries, 2010).
Norman Ackroyd, A Shetland Notebook (London: Royal Academy, 2014); see also RA exhibition catalogues on Ackroyd’s coastal etchings.
Chris Wadsworth, Percy Kelly: The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Drawing (Carlisle: Bookcase, 2010).
Greenberg, “Modernist Painting.”
E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1960), 181–206.
Alan Wilkinson, Henry Moore Remembered: The Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto: AGO, 1987); Henry Moore, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson (London: Lund Humphries, 2002).
Moore, “Notes on Sculpture”; see also his collected Writings and Conversations for the treatment of natural forms as sculptural prompts.