The Lost Estate is a new photographic series which explores the relationship between humans and the natural world through imagined narratives taking place in the gardens of a country estate.
The Lost Estate was commissioned by Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, supported by East Anglia Art Fund and created at High House Artist Residency.
Exhibition at Norwich Castle 20th Jan 2024 - 12th Jan 2025, details here.
The Lost Estate was commissioned by Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, supported by East Anglia Art Fund and created at High House Artist Residency.
Exhibition at Norwich Castle 20th Jan 2024 - 12th Jan 2025, details here.
Exhibition text by curator Rosy Gray
Daniel & Clara
The Lost Estate
20 January 2024 – 12 January 2025, Norwich Castle
The Lost Estate is a new photographic series which explores the relationship between humans and the natural world through imagined narratives taking place in the gardens of a country estate.
The country estate, house and formal garden was a common feature of the rural landscape in pre-industrial England. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries, formal garden design looked to the work of European landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin for inspiration, presenting owners with an idealised version of nature in the garden’s conception.
Inspired by these multiple histories (and possible futures) The Lost Estate explores and expands on these visual traditions. Works such as Everything they wanted and This side of the wall emphasise the garden’s formal boundaries, highlighting the vast external surfaces of the perimeter brick wall. In Everything they wanted, the wall’s presence feels both rooted and ancient, temporary and transient in its position above the foreground: a reminder, perhaps, that what lies beneath our feet is as much a record of humanity as that which sits above.
Using a technique of split-focus photography, which enables two fields of focus within a single image, each work in The Lost Estate explores a tension between the human and non-human, particularly by distorting the relationships of scale between foreground and background. The split also evokes broader themes and narratives present across Daniel & Clara’s work, such as the recurring motif of Adam & Eve experiencing the crisis of being cast out of paradise and realising the consequences of their actions.
In this way, The Lost Estate articulates the fraught and complex relationship between humans and the natural world. We are confronted with these fractures in the subtlety of loss and departure in A last look around, and the mournful presence of decay and decomposition in The edge of the lawn. But there is also light and movement, with a boldness of colour in the green palette across Morning disturbances. The vibrant blue fabric of the figure’s dress similarly demands our attention, a flash point against the garden’s man-made structures.
Daniel & Clara in conversation with curator Rosy Gray at Norwich Castle for the opening of their exhibition The Lost Estate on 20th January 2024.