PLAY–THING–S / ACROSS THE FIELDS

Curator: Klára Zářecká

The exhibition project PLAY–THING–S / ACROSS THE FIELDS opens a new chapter in the work of artist Jana Middleton in the Czech art scene. Jana Middleton has lived and worked in Great Britain for a long time, but despite her international experience, her roots remain firmly connected to East Bohemia.

The title of the exhibition refers to the boundary, which the artist perceives not as a barrier or a definitive divide, but as a mutable, permeable, and temporary space. A boundary can restrict, protect, separate, and connect. The subtitle ACROSS THE FIELDS encourages wandering through the landscape off the beaten path and recalls the possibility of physically and symbolically crossing the lines that humans create.

The artist's site-specific installation sensitively reacts to the architecture and original purpose of the Gočár Gallery building as the main building of the automatic mills, while also newly developing themes of landscape, nature, and humanity. Here, the author engages in a dialogue with space, light, sound, and the memory of the place. The installation is vibrant, interactive, and carries a deep and meditative dimension. It explores where the image begins and how materials, light, sound, and the viewer become part of the work. In an industrial environment, it seeks aesthetic fragility, variability, and unexpected beauty.

The central work consists of an eighty-meter-long monumental drawing on netting, created as a performative reaction to the sounds of the automatic mill. It acts as a musical score connecting the rhythm of the machine, the movement of the wind, and the human body. Suspended in space, it moves with the flow of air and reacts to the presence of visitors. Its structure may resemble details of stalks and ears of grain, but on a monumental scale, it transforms into an abstract landscape. The drawing thus becomes not only a record of sound but its spatial materialization. Listening to the production processes became an impulse for the creation of drawings, which were subsequently translated into voice through collective singing into a living, fragile sound organism, in which the human voice, the sound of the machine, and nature are intertwined. Landscape, machine, and voice come together here as one entity. For the sound composition, the author collaborated with dramaturg and sound designer Ladislav Železný, composer and musician Simon Holmes, and the community experimental vocal choir Portobello Drone Choir.

The exhibition connects sound, drawing, textile, pigment, and found objects. Everyday materials are transformed into visual, spatial, and sound situations. Projections onto translucent textile open up the theme of selection and sorting – what passes through the sieve and what remains aside, as a metaphor for human judgment and the creation of boundaries. The viewer enters the work with their own body, and their silhouette becomes part of the image. The exhibition thus re-raises the question of where an artwork begins and how material, light, sound, and human movement contribute to its creation. The landscape here is not merely a depicted motif but a living, mutable space that arises in the relationship between humans, nature, machine, and place.

CREATIVE SKETCHBOOK

An integral part of the exhibition is a creative sketchbook that transfers the principle of PLAY – THING – S into everyday life and moves the motif of ACROSS THE FIELDS beyond the gallery space.