Visual Arts

Town and Country is a collaboration between Project Space Leeds (PSL) and Harewood House Trust exploring issues around the urban and the rural based on the relationship between the two sites and notions of migration. It features works by Susan Collins, Justine Gaunt, Pippa Hale, Kerry Harker, Diane Howse, Nous Vous and Simon Warner.

Hortuseum is the unlikely and unexpected creation of a garden in the urban setting of PSL. Rows of vegetable plants are arranged in a grid resembling the classic form of a market garden. The locating of ripening and rambling produce in this city-centre gallery aims to refocus our ideas of where food comes from. The new word Hortuseum reflects this idea, being a fusion of 'horticulture' and 'museum'.

Country Cottage

The Country Cottage Museum is a micro museum displaying prints, postcards, books, tea sets and jigsaw puzzles in vintage furniture and display cases. The country cottage is a powerfully evocative image in English culture, which conjures up an idea of a rural past bathed in the rosy glow of nostalgia. In this exhibition, the classic portrayal of a thatched, half-timbered dwelling with rambling roses over the door, distorts the reality of the complex and often less-than-idyllic life in the countryside.

Aerial Module is a work that exists simultaneously in the two locations of PSL and Harewood House. Numerous cubic structures, suspended in the branches of trees, allude to the idea of bird boxes. There is also the suggestion of a journey or migration between the two locations: birds notably do not acknowledge the boundaries, or even differences, between urban and rural locations.

Susan Collins' Harewood shows images of Harewood's 'Capability' Brown landscape filmed on a webcam over the course of a year. The live footage shown at PSL plays on parallels between the mechanically composed digital image and the formally constructed landscape.

While PSL will mainly be concentrating on the urban aspect, Harewood House will bring the rural into focus with a selection of great works by the likes of Alphonse Dousseau, Robert Buttery, George Walker and the legend that is JMW Turner. Harewood House has a fine collection of Turner masterpieces, many of them commissioned especially for the estate, and will be displaying other Turner works not seen before at this venue.

Town and Country runs at Project Space Leeds (PSL), Whitehall Waterfront, 2 Riverside Way from Wednesday 22 July - Tuesday 22 September 2009 and at Harewood House from Sunday 19 July - Monday 20 September 2009. Entry is free.