Flora: 150 Years of Environmental Change in Cornwall – curated by Kurt Jackson

This autumn Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance is staging an exhibition about the flora of West Cornwall curated by internationally renowned artist Kurt Jackson, which runs from 9 October 2024 to 11 January 2025.

Contemporary artist Kurt Jackson, whose own art process is heavily informed by studied observation and deep respect for the natural world, was invited to curate an exhibition reflecting his concerns about environmental change. Jackson has used Penlee House’s collections and the art of the Newlyn School as evidence of this change and created his own artistic response.

Jackson values these Victorian paintings not simply as beautiful pieces of art, but equally as a visual record; a window to the natural world as seen and utilised in the late 1800s and early 1900s. For Jackson, these paintings by artists such as Stanhope Forbes, Harold Harvey and Lamorna Birch function as a reference point for comparison to today.

In the curation of this exhibition, Jackson focused on the botanical as represented by the Newlyn School – selecting paintings with flora, plant matter and local habitats depicted as setting, background or subject and, through meticulous research, pin-pointed the original vantage points. For Jackson, these became places to visit and study and sometimes to make his own works to illustrate the changes and processes that have occurred in the last 100 years or so; an opportunity to demonstrate both losses and gains within the plant world.

Jackson says “Fortunately, in Cornwall there are corners and edges where nature has survived, and when permitted, thrives. There are still a few small family farms where quality reigns over quantity. There are organic, regenerative and conservation-minded people, those involved in rewilding and organisations working for Cornwall’s environment. We can still find the tiny fields, the Cornish hedges, the bogs and marshes, the plethora of wildflowers, the wild. Cornwall’s heart and soul.”

Flora: 150 Years of Environmental Change in Cornwall will be on display at Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance from 9 October 2024 to 11 January 2025.