Jana Middleton: HRA–NIC–E / ACROSS THE FIELDS

Author: Jana Middleton

Curator: Klára Zářecká

The exhibition project HRA–NIC–E / PŘES POLNÍ opens a new chapter in the work of artist Jana Middleton in the Czech visual arts scene. Jana Middleton has long lived and worked in the United Kingdom, yet despite her international experience, her roots remain firmly bound to East Bohemia.

The title of the exhibition refers to a border, which the artist perceives not as a barrier or a definitive divide, but as a changeable, permeable and temporary space. A border may limit, protect, separate or connect. The subtitle PŘ**ES POLNÍ invites wandering through the landscape off familiar routes and recalls the possibility of physically and symbolically crossing the lines that people create.

The author's site specific installation responds sensitively to the architecture and original purpose of the Gočár Gallery building, which served as the main building of the automatic mills, while also developing themes of landscape, nature and the human being. Here the artist enters into a dialogue with space, light, sound and the memory of the place. The installation is living, interactive and carries a deep and meditative dimension. It explores where a picture begins and how materials, light, sound and the viewer become part of the work. In the industrial setting it seeks aesthetic fragility, changeability and unexpected beauty.

The central work is an eighty-metre-long monumental drawing on mesh, created as a performative response to the sounds of the automatic mill. It functions as a musical score connecting the rhythm of the machine, the movement of the wind and the human body. Suspended in the space, it moves with the air currents and responds to the presence of visitors. Its structure may recall the details of stalks and ears of grain, but at monumental scale it transforms into an abstract landscape. The drawing thus becomes not only a record of sound but its spatial embodiment. Listening to the production processes became the impulse for the drawings, which were subsequently translated into voice through collective singing, forming a living, fragile sound organism in which the human voice, the sound of the machine and of nature intertwine. Landscape, machine and voice merge here into a single whole. On the sound composition the artist collaborated with dramaturg and sound designer Ladislav Železný, composer and musician Simon Holmes, and the community experimental vocal choir Portobello Drone Choir.

The exhibition combines sound, drawing, textile, pigment and found objects. Everyday materials are transformed into visual, spatial and sonic situations. A projection onto translucent textile opens the theme of selection and sorting, of what passes through the sieve and what remains aside, as a metaphor for human judgement 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 again asks where an artwork begins and how the material, light, sound and movement of a person contribute to its making. Landscape here is not merely a depicted motif, but a living, changing space that arises in the relationship between people, nature, machine and place.

CREATIVE SKETCHBOOK

An integral part of the exhibition is the creative sketchbook, which carries the principle of HRA – NIC – E into everyday life and takes the motif of PŘES POLNÍ beyond the gallery space.

The exhibition is under the patronage of Roman Línek, councillor for culture of the Pardubice Region.