Curtis Magri is half-Maltese and has included a fragment of Maltese lace in the show. Traced over views of the valley like a filter on a camera, it appears as a recurring motif in Curtis Magri’s drawings, acting as a set of stepping stones that guides the viewer across the pictures and creates a continuity as we explore the town through her eyes. It too connects outwards from Rawtenstall, into transnational networks of materials, trade and exchange.

Curtis Magri’s imagination was captured by another British artist, John Piper, at the outset of the project. Her eye was drawn to the blue hues and fluid lines of ‘Lower Mill, Rossendale’ (1954), a lithograph of a scene in Rawtenstall, commissioned by local textile manufacturer Whiteheads in the early 1950s, that also forms part of the Whitaker collection. In a highly stylised depiction that accentuates the light and shade of the valley, textile manufacturing and topography are equally prominent. The distinctive sawtooth roof of the Whiteheads factory is foregrounded and sloping hills, industrial chimneys and electricity pylons tower over diminutive terraced houses reflecting everyday life in the valley.

During the Second World War, Piper was an official war artist, working on the Recording Britain project. This functioned as propaganda as well as art, documenting (usually rural) buildings and industries at threat not just from war but from social and technological modernisation.[6] After the war, Piper designed textiles and stained glass for settings such as new post-war places of worship, as part of a generation of artists who sought to bring art and design to the public in accessible, everyday settings. He was also one of a number of contemporary artists whose work was translated into textiles by David Whitehead & Sons, bringing modern art to a wider audience in contexts such as domestic furnishings[7]. Like Ruskin, Piper was inspired by Venice, creating a series of works that acted as a guide to the city[8]; among his works that were translated into designs for Whiteheads were impressionistic depictions of the historic palazzi of Venice.

Since discovering that one of the volunteers at the museum was gestated in his mother’s womb in a small cottage that is visible in the background of Piper’s lithograph, Curtis Magri’s interest in the site has gone beyond the physical to encompass residual memory of the factory in Rawtenstall. She interviewed volunteers with personal memories of Whiteheads and sought to revisit the site of the factory, which was cleared in the 1980s and is now occupied by ASDA, taking local asylum seekers and refugees on a walk to its former location. This became a communal act of (re)mapping, creating a connection between local people and places. A film documenting the walk, ‘From A to D: A walk from one side of Rawtenstall to the other’ (2024), created in collaboration with drone artist Ronan Quilty, enabled Curtis Magri to take a wider view and navigate between viewpoints: the small-scale, partial and introspective, and the bigger picture.

A strong sense of the human and subjective runs through the exhibition, most visibly in Kelly’s print ‘Absences and Presences’ (2024), which places a figure at the centre of a map of Rawtenstall and its surrounding area. Also on display is a photo from the Whitaker collection of a group of children posing wearing lace collars at Bury Road School in Haslingden in the 1880s, which inspired Kelly’s map pieces in the show. Just as Curtis Magri places life events at the heart of Rawtenstall, and seeks to reinstate family ties and connections through her exploration of Lower Mill, Kelly’s work prioritises the personal in contrast to the stiff formality of the photograph.

Another parallel to The Lie of the Land might be drawn with the Mass-Observation movement, which was active in Bolton, a Lancashire textile town close to Rawtenstall, during the 1930s. Mass-Observation sought to record everyday life and industry, yet incorporated elements of surrealism and techniques such as collage alongside straighter documentary approaches such as photography.[9]

This sense of surrealism is evident in both Kelly and Magri’s work. Both artists take certain liberties with landscape, while co-opting and subverting standardised tools for recording and measuring the land. Curtis Magri’s drawing ‘If Pigs Could Fly’ (2017), for example, incorporates elements of fantasy, while her recto-verso drawings challenge our expectations of landscape art as a painterly and fixed rendering of reality by retaining the annotations and guiding marks of a working drawing or study, from grid lines to handwritten notes regarding potential choices on colour and composition. In ‘Fractal Atlas: the measure of my world’ (2024), Kelly plays with our preconceptions and sense of scale, juxtaposing the outlines of different countries onto a familiar grid of British towns and cities.

Though bringing together disparate artistic techniques, perspectives and approaches to landscape, there is one work that encapsulates the themes and ethos of The Lie of the Land. Presented above a fireplace in a former front room – a small remnant of the Whitaker building’s domestic past – Kelly’s papercut ‘Lace Caress’ (2022) takes the form of two arms outstretched, reaching in opposite directions but meeting in the middle. Repurposing Ordnance Survey maps, it not only captures the human, tactile dimension of landscape and ways of navigating through places which rely on senses and personal relationships, but reflects the collaborative nature of Kelly and Curtis Magri’s creative investigations of Rawtenstall.

[1] https://www.thewhitaker.org/about-us/

[2] Déirdre Kelly, Tracery – Venice and the Lakes Interlaced, Brantwood, Cumbria, 20 April – 11 July 2023

[3] Natalie Bradbury, ‘The Artist as Crime Scene Investigator: Carolyn Curtis Magri’s Forensi Drawings’, The Fourdrinier, June 2022: https://www.thefourdrinier.com/the-artist-as-crime-scene-investigator-carolyn-curtis-magris-forensic-drawings

[4] Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art, The Architectural Press, 1956

[5] Stuart Eagles, ‘Thomas Coglan Horsfall, and Manchester Art Museum and University Settlement’, the encyclopaedia of informal education, 2009: https://infed.org/mobi/thomas-coglan-horsfall-and-manchester-art-museum-and-university-settlement/

[6] Gill Saunders, Recording Britain, V&A Publications, 2012

[7] Francesca Young, ‘A Collection of Textile Designs for David Whitehead and Sons’, Tennants Auctioneers, January 2020, https://www.tennants.co.uk/discover/news-insights/a-collection-of-textile-designs-for-david-whitehead-and-sons/

[8] https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6196659

[9] Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction, Routledge, 2002

Curtis Magri is half-Maltese and has included a fragment of Maltese lace in the show. Traced over views of the valley like a filter on a camera, it appears as a recurring motif in Curtis Magri’s drawings, acting as a set of stepping stones that guides the viewer across the pictures and creates a continuity as we explore the town through her eyes. It too connects outwards from Rawtenstall, into transnational networks of materials, trade and exchange.

Map-reading is usually regarded as a skill that requires acquired knowledge, an assumption that is acknowledged by the display of a selection of books such as a ‘Manual of Map Reading, Photo Reading, and Field Sketching’ (republished by the War Office in 1939), and a 1960s Ladybird book on ‘Understanding Maps’, near to Kelly and Curtis Magri’s work. The Lie of the Land, by contrast, shows that the act of mapping has creative and imaginative potential and that personal, first-hand knowledge and experience should be valued alongside more (supposedly) objective and factual perspectives.

In the pair of collages ‘Passage: Sound’ (2024) and ‘Passage: Sight’ (2024), Kelly questions the ways in which maps are read as ‘the truth’, particularly in relation to (especially faraway) landscapes which the viewer has not visited in-person. This work takes as its basis two 1850s colonial-era maps depicting trade routes, which feature stereotypical representations of places and customs as well as geographical features such as mountains and islands which have since been found not to exist. Imposing collaged eyes and ears upon the maps, Kelly highlights the potential for what is presented as knowledge or ‘truth’ to change. She also suggests that the traveller has the capacity to add their own meanings and interpretations to places and build a more rounded picture.

That our view of where we are changes according to our position in relation to it is particularly evident in a drawing by Curtis Magri, who worked as an art tutor in British prisons for several years, entitled ‘Prison Loaf’ (2014). Inspired by a type of foodstuff commonly found in American prisons, her dense cross-section of the food’s structure doubles as an imagined landscape – resembling complex geological forms – that captures the claustrophobia and confinement of prison, where life and places external to the prisoner’s immediate four walls must be pieced together from memory, imagination and snippets of information recalling the outside world.

Both artists are steeped in an artistic lineage of observation. The resulting work is rooted in a tradition of recording place in a way that captures what might be termed the genius loci, or intangible qualities, of a particular setting alongside its literal physical features (the architectural historian and guide Nikolaus Pevsner described the genius loci, or “character of the site”, as comprising “not only the geographical but also the historical, social and especially the aesthetic character”).[4]

An important reference for Kelly’s recent work has been the nineteenth century artist, writer and thinker John Ruskin, who promoted the role of crafts and design in society and wished to democratise access to the arts for ordinary people. This included advocating for the establishment of art museums in industrial towns in areas such as Lancashire, where citizens could access ‘good’ art and design.[5] He was one of a number of reformers who saw the arts and crafts as fulfilling an important educational role, aiming to influence both public taste and the standards of manufactured goods.

Kelly and Curtis Magri’s work is presented alongside ‘Venetian Waterway’, a painting of the famous Bridge of Sighs by nineteenth century painter Antonietta Brandeis which was donated to the Whitaker collection in the 1960s. Like many artists, Ruskin sought inspiration and education from the historic city of Venice. He revelled in its light and atmospheric qualities as well as its artistic, architectural and cultural riches, recognising a city in continual flux; Ruskin’s famous 1851 text The Stones of Venice sought to record the historic buildings of Venice as they were eroded by the city’s watery climate.

Curtis Magri’s imagination was captured by another British artist, John Piper, at the outset of the project. Her eye was drawn to the blue hues and fluid lines of ‘Lower Mill, Rossendale’ (1954), a lithograph of a scene in Rawtenstall, commissioned by local textile manufacturer Whiteheads in the early 1950s, that also forms part of the Whitaker collection. In a highly stylised depiction that accentuates the light and shade of the valley, textile manufacturing and topography are equally prominent. The distinctive sawtooth roof of the Whiteheads factory is foregrounded and sloping hills, industrial chimneys and electricity pylons tower over diminutive terraced houses reflecting everyday life in the valley.

During the Second World War, Piper was an official war artist, working on the Recording Britain project. This functioned as propaganda as well as art, documenting (usually rural) buildings and industries at threat not just from war but from social and technological modernisation.[6] After the war, Piper designed textiles and stained glass for settings such as new post-war places of worship, as part of a generation of artists who sought to bring art and design to the public in accessible, everyday settings. He was also one of a number of contemporary artists whose work was translated into textiles by David Whitehead & Sons, bringing modern art to a wider audience in contexts such as domestic furnishings[7]. Like Ruskin, Piper was inspired by Venice, creating a series of works that acted as a guide to the city[8]; among his works that were translated into designs for Whiteheads were impressionistic depictions of the historic palazzi of Venice.

Curtis Magri riffs off Piper’s image of Rawtenstall in ‘What Lies Beneath’ (2024) a series of recto-verso drawings that add layers of exploration and associations to Piper’s static scene. Curtis Magri both adds and takes away, gouging away at areas of the paper, embellishing the valley with references to industrial diseases and chemicals and drawing on the language of isolines and isotherms that are used to track changes in temperature and the weather. While remaining grounded in local history and memory, this concern for environment brings the exhibition up-to-date: Curtis Magri’s work makes reference to both local environmental crime and climate change on a global level.

Since discovering that one of the volunteers at the museum was gestated in his mother’s womb in a small cottage that is visible in the background of Piper’s lithograph, Curtis Magri’s interest in the site has gone beyond the physical to encompass residual memory of the factory in Rawtenstall. She interviewed volunteers with personal memories of Whiteheads and sought to revisit the site of the factory, which was cleared in the 1980s and is now occupied by ASDA, taking local asylum seekers and refugees on a walk to its former location. This became a communal act of (re)mapping, creating a connection between local people and places. A film documenting the walk, ‘From A to D: A walk from one side of Rawtenstall to the other’ (2024), created in collaboration with drone artist Ronan Quilty, enabled Curtis Magri to take a wider view and navigate between viewpoints: the small-scale, partial and introspective, and the bigger picture.

A strong sense of the human and subjective runs through the exhibition, most visibly in Kelly’s print ‘Absences and Presences’ (2024), which places a figure at the centre of a map of Rawtenstall and its surrounding area. Also on display is a photo from the Whitaker collection of a group of children posing wearing lace collars at Bury Road School in Haslingden in the 1880s, which inspired Kelly’s map pieces in the show. Just as Curtis Magri places life events at the heart of Rawtenstall, and seeks to reinstate family ties and connections through her exploration of Lower Mill, Kelly’s work prioritises the personal in contrast to the stiff formality of the photograph.

Another parallel to The Lie of the Land might be drawn with the Mass-Observation movement, which was active in Bolton, a Lancashire textile town close to Rawtenstall, during the 1930s. Mass-Observation sought to record everyday life and industry, yet incorporated elements of surrealism and techniques such as collage alongside straighter documentary approaches such as photography.[9]

This sense of surrealism is evident in both Kelly and Magri’s work. Both artists take certain liberties with landscape, while co-opting and subverting standardised tools for recording and measuring the land. Curtis Magri’s drawing ‘If Pigs Could Fly’ (2017), for example, incorporates elements of fantasy, while her recto-verso drawings challenge our expectations of landscape art as a painterly and fixed rendering of reality by retaining the annotations and guiding marks of a working drawing or study, from grid lines to handwritten notes regarding potential choices on colour and composition. In ‘Fractal Atlas: the measure of my world’ (2024), Kelly plays with our preconceptions and sense of scale, juxtaposing the outlines of different countries onto a familiar grid of British towns and cities.

Though bringing together disparate artistic techniques, perspectives and approaches to landscape, there is one work that encapsulates the themes and ethos of The Lie of the Land. Presented above a fireplace in a former front room – a small remnant of the Whitaker building’s domestic past – Kelly’s papercut ‘Lace Caress’ (2022) takes the form of two arms outstretched, reaching in opposite directions but meeting in the middle. Repurposing Ordnance Survey maps, it not only captures the human, tactile dimension of landscape and ways of navigating through places which rely on senses and personal relationships, but reflects the collaborative nature of Kelly and Curtis Magri’s creative investigations of Rawtenstall.

[1] https://www.thewhitaker.org/about-us/

[2] Déirdre Kelly, Tracery – Venice and the Lakes Interlaced, Brantwood, Cumbria, 20 April – 11 July 2023

[3] Natalie Bradbury, ‘The Artist as Crime Scene Investigator: Carolyn Curtis Magri’s Forensi Drawings’, The Fourdrinier, June 2022: https://www.thefourdrinier.com/the-artist-as-crime-scene-investigator-carolyn-curtis-magris-forensic-drawings

[4] Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art, The Architectural Press, 1956

[5] Stuart Eagles, ‘Thomas Coglan Horsfall, and Manchester Art Museum and University Settlement’, the encyclopaedia of informal education, 2009: https://infed.org/mobi/thomas-coglan-horsfall-and-manchester-art-museum-and-university-settlement/

[6] Gill Saunders, Recording Britain, V&A Publications, 2012

[7] Francesca Young, ‘A Collection of Textile Designs for David Whitehead and Sons’, Tennants Auctioneers, January 2020, https://www.tennants.co.uk/discover/news-insights/a-collection-of-textile-designs-for-david-whitehead-and-sons/

[8] https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6196659

[9] Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction, Routledge, 2002