Statement

“Once you have lived on the land, been a partner with its moods, secrets, and seasons, you cannot leave. The living land remembers, touching you in unguarded moments, saying, I am here. You are part of me.”
The Land Remembers, Ben Logan.

Gordon Senior lives and works in the Central Valley of California, but returns each summer to Norfolk in England. Making sculptures and installations, his work reflects the cultural differences he has experienced in his geographic relocation. More importantly he addresses our common loss of any real relationship with the land. His work has a sense of place, and concerns the relationship of animals and birds with humans.

Senior is preoccupied with displacement from landscape. He expresses this loss of connection through work that depicts animals, incorporating within the sculptures materials such as wood, clay, metals, collaged maps, reproductions of landscape paintings, and beeswax. We have a sense that humans once belonged to, and were part of the earth, but have progressively been losing this, becoming urbanized and displaced. A brown hare, an indigenous wild animal in Britain, typically represents mankind while other animal forms also stand for the artist and ourselves.

Gordon Senior’s work is concerned with nature. There is a feeling of autobiography about his work, which most recently has focused on issues of migration, memory and loss.

In a recent review of Senior’s work Professor David Olivant wrote:

“Senior has thus transformed uncertainty into invention and has charted the process in his recent series of object groups. In some he converts what is natural to his past into the form of his present and in others he transposes the objects of his present environment into a language of nostalgia for his former existence. It is the single achievement of Senior’s recent work to have invigorated the tendency to nostalgia in his earlier work, by exploiting the necessity of his current cultural alienation, and thus create a potent meditation on the nature of memory as well as a subtle critique of multiculturalism”.