By Annie Gunning

LANDSCAPE and Anxiety at One Church Street Gallery in Great Missenden showcases the work of distinguished artist and curatorial partnership, Anne Eggebert and Polly Gould, whose pieces explore how landscapes make you feel rather than merely how they look.

As you look into the Gallery, you cannot fail to be struck by the spectacular nature of Eggebert and Gould’s work. Anne Eggebert’s highly detailed drawings act as a device to collapse distance and time. Combining the 21st century technology of Google Earth images with basic pencil and paper, she makes repeated hatch marks to explore places which were once familiar but no longer visited.

Her pencil echoes the movement of the mouse in its search for particular locations which will open memories, some tinged with sadness, that now speak of absence rather than presence. Beside the monumental drawing 51º 13' N 4º 24' E (The Island at Noon), site of her father’s last home, stands a rather bedraggled pot plant, which I mistakenly imagined had been placed there by the Gallery. I was wrong; this plant was grown from seed taken from a precise point on the drawing. Though struggling to survive in an alien environment - its presence creates a physical link to what had become, for the artist, an empty place.

Anne Eggebert 51º 13' N 4º 24' E (The Island at Noon) pencil on paper (as installed at Danielle Arnaud Gallery) Eggebert also shows medium format photographs of her local area around Epping Forest. Once again the stunning images are highly detailed and despite their ‘localness’, reveal an alarming wildness of tangled growth; these ‘views’ that somehow exclude human entry and, in some instances suggest danger, both keep us at bay and render us redundant through the overwhelming and inexorable forces of natural growth.

Polly Gould’s distorted watercolours of Antarctica, painted on sandblasted glass are reflected in handblown, mirrored silver spheres. These reflections magically assume proper proportions and perspective on the curved surface, creating miniature, 360 degree panoramas, which appear as little worlds from elsewhere.

They are mounted on tall, white plinths, whose depths suggest the thickness of ice of the continent they represent. As I walked round these exquisite objects, I see myself reflected in a slender section on the mirrored surface, reminding me of the effect of the human race on the fragile polar regions. Polly Gould - Silvered hand-blown glass spheres, watercolour on sandblasted glass (as installed at Danielle Arnaud Gallery: photograph John Barraclough) Polly Gould travelled to Antarctica and was inspired by the work of Edward Wilson’s topographic watercolours, made during the Discovery Expedition with Scott in 1911-13.

Only after making her mirrored globes did she discover the South Pole is marked by a metallic sphere in which visitors can see themselves reflected. “Funny to have gone so far to end up looking at yourself” Gould observes.

A fascinating example of Eggebert-and-Gould’s collaborative work is Darwin – a small photo-montage of images selected from digital photographs taken from either 3 or 33,000 feet, during Gould's journey through Australia. These images were emailed to Eggebert back in the UK, where she assembled them into an aerial view of how she envisaged Darwin might be. The resulting image is a jewel-like mosaic of an imagined place built from fragments of reality. Eggbert-and-Gould Darwin photo-montage Anne Eggebert and Polly Gould were judges One Church Street’s photography open submission 2011, Photosensitive.

Eggebert’s fine art practice encompasses photography, sound, video, drawing and teletechnologies to interrogate how our subjective and objective realities construct our understanding and performance of place (both local and distant). She is a senior lecturer in fine art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London.

Recent work by fine artist and writer, Gould has been particularly concerned with the spatialisation of memory, landscape and mourning. In 2008 she was selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and in 2010, was awarded AHRC funding for her doctoral study ‘No More Elsewhere: Melancholia, Subjectivity, Landscape’, As a collaborative team, Eggebert-and-Gould, have completed a number of art and curatorial projects. These include Nature and Nation: vaster than empires, their ACE funded group exhibition of international artists and associated publication, exploring legacies of botanical collecting and colonial histories in contemporary art.

Some of the work in this exhibition was recently shown in their most recent project - TOPOPHOBIA (an irrational dread of certain places or situations) which toured the UK during spring and summer 2012. It was funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and included the work of eight other artists.

Landscape and Anxiety runs from September 15th - September 29th 2012 Gallery opening hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday 11am - 4pm CLOSED Monday, Thursday, Sunday Enquiries 01494 863344 www.onechurchstreet.com e:lyndsey@onechurchstreet.co.uk One Church Street Gallery, 1 Church Street, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, HP16 0AX