Abstract

Landscape has long formed a topic of artistic interest, rising to real prominence in the western art world in the eighteenth century when it was finally accepted as an appropriate subject for ‘academic’ painting, and more recently coming to be a topic of engagement for artists working in a range of different media – from sculpture to performance and land art (Clarke, 1999; Andrews, 1999). Visual arts practices, and especially painting, have long played a crucial role in the development of our ideas and understandings of ‘landscape’. ¹ Indeed, to grasp the significance of artistic engagements with landscape it is important to examine how it is they have become enrolled within studies of the social, economic, cultural and political significance of landscape, and its theorizations.