There is a new addition to the Lowry and Valette Gallery. Manchester Art Gallery is currently displaying the winner of this year’s Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year, a £10,000 commission to celebrate the natural beauty of the North West, its industrial heritage and the 20th anniversary of the re-opening of the Rochdale Canal.
Hosted by Joan Bakewell and Stephen Mangan, Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year has been running for seven series, alongside its sister programme, Portrait Artist of the Year. This year, over 2000 people sent in painted submissions applying for a place in the series in which 40 artists, both amateur and professional, competed alongside hundreds of members of the public hoping to be chosen by the judges as a ‘wildcard’ entrant. All with a chance at winning the coveted commission, along with £500 worth of Cass Arts materials.
Landscape Artist of the Year Presenters Joan Bakewell and Stephen Mangan © story vault films/Sky UK Ltd.
For each of the five heats, the programme takes contestants to a location that provides both inspiration and challenge. This series featured the Eden Project, Compton Verney, Whitstable Harbour, the Forth Bridge and Levens Hall.
The eight contestants in each heat have four hours in which to complete their paintings, in whatever medium they choose. Each artist works in their own weatherproof ‘pod’, while being interviewed by Stephen and Joan and questioned by the three judges; independent curator Kathleen Soriano, award-winning artist Tai Shan Schierenberg, and art historian Kate Bryan.
The judges; Kathleen Soriano, Tai Schierenberg and Kaye Bryan Photo by Steve Peskett © story vault films /Sky UK Ltd.
When time is up, the judges draw up a shortlist of three contestants, judging them alongside their initial entry submissions in order to choose the winner of that heat, that winner going forward to the semi-final.
Elisha Enfield, © story vault films / Sky UK Ltd
This year, Elisha Enfield won the series. Elisha is a professional artist from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire who divides her time between painting and her job in film production. Through her art, she explores the ethereal and eerie in the landscape. Fire fascinates Elisha and her submission for the programme is one of a series inspired by the bonfires of Walpurgisnacht, a historic festival in Germany.
2104 by Elisha Enfield (2021) photo © Elisha Enfield
Elisha took part in the first heat at the Eden Project in Cornwall, with the challenge of depicting the project’s biomes among the surrounding natural landscape. While most contestants sought to address the hexagonal structure of the geodesic domes, Elisha ignored that element, opting for a more organic approach.
Eden project painting, photo © Elisha Enfield
This work won her a place in the semi-final, with the judges declaring that Elisha’s finished work had a cinematic quality that was atmospheric and intoxicating, and invested her painting with an otherworldliness, transforming the biomes into living, dying shapes.
There is something about the brushwork here, too. The more detailed landscapes are, the more they seem to crystallise and capture a particular instance, a single moment. Elisha’s work does the opposite. It has a way of incorporating the passage of time. It’s almost as if the lack of detail is because we’re seeing a speeded up time-lapse film; years compressed into moments, decades blurring into an instant, from the first moment of breaking ground and the construction of the domes to the planting and growth of the surrounding greenery, like something out of HG Wells’ The Time Machine.
The scene for the semi-final was the Forth Bridge on the Firth of Forth in Scotland. Again, there was the mix of the industrial and natural, underscoring the themes of the commission prize.
Here, Elisha painted on aluminium rather than canvas, an unusual surface as it won’t absorb paint the way canvas or board would. The paint slides around the smooth surface; the shininess of the aluminium lending its metallic quality to the bridge and a translucence to the overcast sky.
Elisha won the semi-final, the judges seeing her work as a reinterpretation of the bridge, giving us a sense of place, atmosphere, and light.
Forth Bridge painting photo © Elisha Enfield
Again, her landscape seems to encompass the entire existence of the bridge, a compressed passage of time blurring the details of its construction, from the laying of the foundations and raising of the first girders, through to completion and beyond; the brush marks of the sky and water lending it the air of a worn, time-damaged old daguerreotype photograph.
The series final took place on the edge of the Lake District, at Levens Hall, a stately home famous for its topiary garden. Finalists also had two weeks to complete a commission; to capture a view that reflects the focus of environmental sustainability that lies at the heart of the new Paddington Basin development to be judged alongside their paintings from the final.
Leven’s Hall painting © Elisha Enfield
Paddington Basin commissioned painting © Elisha Enfield
The judges’ verdict was that Elisha produced a striking painting even with such a reduced colour palette, the tones taking it back to a very traditional sort of painting. Again, they thought the work had a cinematic quality to it and that Elisha herself was an enigmatic, quite poetic artist that took risks, came at things from a strange angle but still delivered. On that basis, they declared Elisha the winner of the series and the all-important commission.
The winning commission brief, asking the artist to incorporate the natural beauty of the North West, its industrial heritage and the 20th anniversary of the re-opening of the Rochdale Canal, was always going to be a tough challenge.
There are plenty of artists in the collection who have captured several aspects of this in the past and Elisha’s work was compared favourably to that of Adolphe Valette, who has form in capturing the urban landscapes of industrial Manchester, his Impressionist style softening them into something almost romantic.
Windsor Bridge on the Irwell by Adolphe Valette (1909) © Manchester Art Gallery
To help with her commission, Elisha took a barge trip along the Rochdale Canal to find out about its history. The Rochdale Canal was opened in 1804. Thirty-two miles long, it rises by 103 metres as it goes over the Pennines, needing 91 locks to navigate its climb. It runs between Calder and Hebble Navigation, Sowerby Bridge in Yorkshire to the Bridgewater Canal in Manchester.
The Old Bridgewater Canal Terminus by Henry Edward Tidmarsh (1893) © Manchester Art Gallery
The canal supplied mills en route, picking up and dropping off goods such as cotton, wool, coal, limestone and salt from the north west, the heart of the Industrial Revolution thanks to the circumstances of its geology. It was a marvel of Victorian engineering.
The Dinner Hour, Wigan by Earle Crowe (1874) © Manchester Art Gallery
But progress never stands still. Advances in machinery and technology led to the introduction of the steam train. In 1841, the Manchester to Leeds railway was completed, running through the Summit Tunnel by the village of Littleborough. It was another feat of industrial engineering, but canal trade suffered because of the speedier competition. The last full freight journey by water happened in 1932 and the canal finally closed to traffic twenty years later. The restored canal was reopened to navigation along its entire length on 1st July 2002.
Elisha’s research trip took her through Hebden Bridge, near the start of the Rochdale Canal, which is featured in another painting in our collection. The Great Green Hills of Yorkshire (1913) by Bertram Priestman shows Hebden Bridge nestled in the valley. We can see mills down there and, in the background, to the right, the church of St Thomas’, Heptonstall that Elisha visited to find out about the pre-industrial weavers who plied their trade there and how the coming of industrialisation decimated their cottage industry. (The church is also the burial place of the poet Sylvia Plath).
The Great Green Hills of Yorkshire by Bertram Priestman (1913) © Manchester Art Gallery
It’s interesting that Elisha chose a similar solution to her own commission; a valley view. Her commission captures how industry shapes and scars the landscape.
21st December 1804 by Elisha Enfield, photo © Elisha Enfield
Here, we are looking down on the village of Littleborough, through which the canal passes. The picture shows a view from a hilltop down into the valley below, where the Rochdale Canal runs through the village of Littleborough. The Chelburn Reservoir, serving the canal, is in the background while, to the right, on the hillside below us, a fire burns.
While fire holds a fascination for Elisha, as seen in her initial submission, she uses it here not only as a personal motif, but perhaps to represent the many disasters, injuries and deaths that came with industrialisation. It partially references the Fothergill and Harvey Cotton Mill fire in Littleborough in 2015, but more particularly, it depicts the Summit Tunnel fire of 1984.
Summit Tunnel Fire - Left: image Manchester Fire /Manchester evening news Right: image source Amateur Ramblings
When it was built, the Summit Tunnel was the longest railway tunnel in the world, running for 1.6 miles (2.6 km) under the Pennines between Littleborough and Walden. In 1984, a goods train pulling thirteen tankers filled with one million litres of petrol derailed in the tunnel. Sparks ignited the petrol vapour and the entire train went up. The extreme heat in the tunnel used up all the oxygen drove the fire up through the vertical ventilation shafts, forcing plumes of fire and molten material 43 metres into the air. The heat was so intense that it welded the tankers to the tracks. Luckily, no lives were lost.
Elisha said during her research that she was “getting a ghostly sense of the past and present overlapping” and wanted to find a way to paint that. That sense of time compression in the painting, of the passage of time, is still there. The way she has created the clouds and sky brings a Turner-like atmosphere, the brushstrokes capturing the rapidly changing weather of the Pennines. And again, with the fire almost burnishing the surface and the way the sky and landscape blur round the village, it suggests an old, damaged daguerreotype, adding to the sense of the passage of time.
Given the wide-ranging brief, it was always going to be difficult to fulfil everyone’s expectations, but Elisha Enfield has given us a painting that captures a historic quality, while depicting the atmosphere of the Northern landscape.
What do you think?
The painting is on display in Gallery 16 for the next three months.