STANLEY DONWOOD: SACRED CARTOGRAPHY
Stanley Donwood, Cerne Abbas, Screenprint. Courtesy Jealous Gallery.One day Stanley Donwood will be written about without mention of the fact that he has been responsible for all Radiohead’s album-cover artwork since they started. Although not in this piece. Not yet.
But Donwood (real name Dan Rickwood) is much more than just an album sleeve designer, as his latest exhibition – at Jealous East in Shoreditch – demonstrates. The show, entitled Sacred Cartography, is something of a follow-up to his recent showcase, Modern Landscapes, at the Saatchi Gallery, previously displayed at Glastonbury Festival.
For Jealous, Donwood has produced eight large screen-prints of his Sacred Landscapes series, in which the English countryside ‘has been scooped up and dropped in California and drenched in psychedelic drugs and the bright pigments derived from petrochemicals’.
His MO was to mutate Ordnance Survey maps images featuring ancient (and Victorian) English land art (the Cerne Abbas Giant, the Long Man of Wilmington etc) erasing any modern features – pylons, hedges, parish boundaries – so that only the prehistoric field boundaries and trackways remain. All this in a brash, bold colourfield: all reds, oranges, blues and yellows. Vertical lines, echoing those colours, reach towards black, black skies, connecting heaven and earth.
This all begs the question: is he depicting the long-lost past, or a post-apocalyptic future? Decide for yourself.