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Rural Slop: Subverting Notions of Contemporary Rural Art

  • Victoria Lucy Williams

This publication challenges and subverts traditional notions of contemporary rural art, featuring 18 fantastic contemporary artists that offer a fresher and more exciting view of the countryside, opposed to the chocolate box depictions of landscape often exhibited. We want this project to act as a catalyst for discussion, bringing artists together from often isolated environments and promoting discussion around opportunity and access in rural regions. ​Slop is a curatorial project formed in April 2020, working to promote underrepresented artists through exhibitions, collaborations, and publications. As a partnership between a philosopher and a visual artist we understand the elitism that permeates the art world and will challenge this with projects based on the value of the artwork as opposed to the education, connections, or privilege of the artist. Currently working on a volunteer basis we hope to grow Slop with ambitious projects; our first priority being gaining funding to pay artists fairly. - By Slop Projects See the full publication using the link below. https://issuu.com/slop.projects/docs/rural_slop1

A far cry away from today's monoculture, these wild areas have always existed on the edge of a deep temporal community farming past, although no longer retaining folkloric tales that these edge-lands are the well-known habitat of the local wild woman or wildman, witch or even shaman. Unmanicured and unconditioned unlike much of the countryside today, sit rich pockets of wild ecosystems that become inextricably linked with the shadowier habits of modern human society, much like edge-lands throughout human history, albeit telling a different, but a similar story about the local populations to one our ancestors would have told, together still creating an ecosystem that intermingles our abandonment and attitude toward the more wild rural places that cling onto edge-lands, in this case, the M27 motorway and the village where I grew up that has its roots in past of strawberry production, Sarisbury green. Redundant tractors remain still like standing stones whilst their seats becoming populated with forest-like microcosms, roe deer skulls hang in trees like ancestral ritualistic sacrifices. Collapsed caravans sink in on themselves, buried by wet leaves and surrounded by a funeral procession of catkins. The wildman resembles one of our more ape-like relatives. Car pedals rust away next to the battery like some antiquated farming tools. A contrasting yet similar to the once rural folkloric and mythic tellings of countryside dwelling inhabitants towards neighbouring borderlands.
Burial, 2020
Wildman, 2020
Stirups, 2020
Ritual, 2020
Evergreen Forest, 2020
Standing Stone, 2020
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