A Rocky Hillside with Trees and Figures 

Curator: Let’s spend a moment with "A Rocky Hillside with Trees and Figures", a drawing rendered in pencil, attributed to James Ward. What strikes you about it? Editor: A hushed, almost haunted, stillness. The figures feel tiny against the immensity of the rocks, as if they are swallowed up in the geological timescale of the scene. Curator: Exactly, Ward masterfully depicts geological matter through labor-intensive mark-making and an extraordinary arrangement of grey pigments to conjure volume. Do you feel a pre industrial relationship between men and landscape? Editor: Absolutely, it's clear Ward is attentive to texture, to the ways that manual labor imprints itself on materials. The stratification in the rocks speaks to layers of time, a geological sedimentation that dwarfs the efforts of figures walking across. It seems Ward wanted us to remember men in nature but primarily focusing on rendering. It also suggests a shift in labor where industrial extraction becomes increasingly distanced from an intimate engagement with landscape Curator: It is indeed a beautiful dialectic of surface and depth! One might even describe it as… sensual, I would propose to define it like an elegy to naturalistic drawing... It’s melancholic; the rough pencil strokes carry the memory of a natural, hand made landscape tradition while anticipating that they will not always endure… Editor: But what interests me is the figures; those small characters in the background suggest an attempt to inscribe humanity in a geological space. The pencil's grey shades make them spectral. They almost fade out... Curator: Their relative scale is what does it to me. Consider their finitude compared to the stones that could last forever! Isn’t there a hint of existential meditation here? I think Ward is thinking about something far deeper than sketching! He reflects on being and oblivion, time passing by... Editor: And by making landscape inseparable from the figures traversing it, perhaps he highlights the labor inherent in experiencing even a sublime view. Not all see the geological layer under Ward's apparent idyllic scene. In our time, Ward makes us aware about who extracts and under which working conditions. That image is as much material as representation of "landscape", as such. Curator: True, true! But there’s an undeniable current of something almost ethereal in it too. Thanks for clarifying some notions about labour to fully get it!. Sobering and beautiful, like all the best things. Editor: Precisely, it’s a landscape pregnant with possibility – material and imaginative. A conversation begun, but certainly not ended!