A sudden downpour (The Lost Estate), Daniel & Clara. Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal archival paper, 106cm x 72cm, 2024
The Lost Estate
By Susan OwensDisobedience, transgression, banishment: gardens are laden with symbolism that we usually choose to ignore. Ever since Adam and Eve were marched down Eden’s garden path and thrust out into the wider world, gardeners have been attempting to recapture a patch of that lost paradise – and artists have been painting it. Daniel & Clara, however, have been more ambitious than most. In The Lost Estate they have re-thought the age-old theme of a man and a woman in a garden, giving it new emotional and psychological resonance. The resulting series of meticulously composed photographs have an atmosphere finely balanced between enchantment and disenchantment, the situations they unfold mysterious, melancholy and bristling with unease. In ‘A last look around’, a couple seem absorbed in their own dismay, their faces marked by sorrow; ‘This side of the wall’ reverberates with the sense of an ending, of being cast out into what the foregrounded thistles predict will be a thornier world. In some the man and the woman are close, while in others they seem estranged from each other. Each photograph in its own way is ambiguous and hard to read and we, the viewers, are left playing with pieces of a puzzle that does not quite fit together. What is the couple’s relationship? Is – or was – the garden theirs? Why are they dressed in formal clothes but barefoot and, in the woman’s case, wearing no jewellery? One thing rings out from each, however: the party is most definitely over.
‘Estate’ must be one of the slipperiest words in the English language, many of its meanings archaic or downright contradictory. As a title, Daniel & Clara’s Lost Estate tilts this way and that and cannot be made to stay in one place. The cinematic scenes would not be out of place in a film by Stephen Poliakoff; his recurrent subjects of owners and exiles, those who belong and those who cannot be made to fit in, occupy similar thematic and emotional territory. We might conclude that Daniel & Clara are telling a story of disinheritance, that the estate is lost to this couple or to those close to them and that they wander through its grounds preparing for their exile. But perhaps it could be a lost estate in itself, a romantic domain like the one described by Alain-Fournier in his classic novel of 1913, Le Grand Meaulnes, that the couple discovered as adolescents. Did the spell break when they returned as adults? We could be looking at a drama of disenchantment, a parable on the folly of going back.
A third and more radical possibility, however, tugs insistently at the mind. Among the archaic meanings of estate is what the bible sonorously calls the ‘estate of man’ (or woman), implying the state of being an adult, which brings with it moral responsibilities. If this estate has been lost, then we are in trouble indeed. Daniel & Clara themselves have described The Lost Estate as ‘Adam and Eve at the end of the world’, an image of catastrophic human failure – this time, one of custodianship – and another banishment – this time, from large regions of the globe. The Garden of Eden was the original lost estate; having taken insufficient responsibility for the wider world, we are busy creating another. In this interpretation, The Lost Estate is a metaphor for one of the most urgent subjects humans face today.
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Exhibition view of Daniel & Clara: The Lost Estate, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 2024. Photo by David Kirkham.
A deeply felt sense of both place and time sits at the heart of all Daniel & Clara’s projects, with a work such as Avebury Imaginary exploring the monument’s rootedness in the ancient landscape and its continuing resonances. The feeling for place in The Lost Estate is so strong as to be almost tangible: the colours of the photographic prints glow with vivid presence, drawing the viewer into the compositions. But it is complicated by the sense that both place and time are so evidently transient. Part of this arises from the natural cycle of the plants in the garden – what we see is lush, late summer growth. Rudbeckias and red-hot pokers are making a final gaudy show, soft cobwebs of thistledown adhere to stems and an artichoke blazes into flower, its great leaves mottled, heavy with their own fleshiness and on the verge of collapse. The garden is wildly alive but tinged with the premonition of decay, already infected with its own demise. The sky is overcast with impending rain, humidity making the atmosphere heavier still. The compost and dead leaves in the foreground of ‘Everything they wanted’ is the final destination – for the plants, and, in time, for the human couple too: earth to earth.
The couple, imbued as they are with a sense of impending departure, may reflect the year’s turning point and dramatise the passing of time. But one could look at it another way. Perhaps the man and the woman are spirits of the place, which would suggest a more permanent connection. The lost estate might be their domain. In ‘A sudden downpour’ the bright blue of the woman’s dress chimes with the colour of the artichoke flower – the split lens, with its two fields of focus, draws our attention to this affinity. ‘Everything they wanted’ has the two standing immobile like human garden statuary (one thinks of Peter Greenaway’s 1994 film The Draughtsman’s Contract). And in ‘Morning disturbances’ the lake presents them with a reflection as though endorsing their presence on its bank, while a dragonfly in the foreground echoes the angular shapes of the running woman’s arms and legs. ‘The edge of the lawn’ features the two as puckish spirits, united, crouching and pausing to listen, confiding whispered secrets. Are they tied to this place by some magic? Perhaps they are ghosts, unable to leave – despite having physically left long ago. The heavy, dream-like atmosphere Daniel & Clara evoke in this series makes us distinctly aware of the past simmering away beneath the present.
And what about us, the work’s viewers? We are implicated by the positions from which we watch the unfolding story. Viewpoints can tell you a lot about an artist. Once upon a time it was conventional for artists to present landscape views from a high vantage point: look! works like this say; behold the sweeping view that lies at your feet and imagine yourself lord of all you survey. This reached its apogee with Johannes Kip and Leonard Knyff’s breathtakingly impressive bird’s-eye views of grand, newly built estates in post-Restoration England. In the Victorian period, however, artists became ever more fascinated by the detail of leaf and lichen, and viewpoints got lower and lower until artists’ noses were in the undergrowth. In most of the photographs of The Lost Estate series our viewpoint appears not so much low as clandestine. We peer up at the couple from a flowerbed or a compost heap; we conceal ourselves behind the leaves of a huge artichoke and a clump of thistles and look over the tops of leaves; we crouch down by the side of the lake and keep them under surveillance through the reeds. Are we spies – or another kind of witness to the ambiguous psychodrama playing out in front of us? Whichever it is, what the viewpoints do not permit us to do is to pose as innocent bystanders, much less as entitled inheritors. As The Lost Estate unfolds its insights about time and place, ownership and disinheritance, Daniel & Clara ensure that we are all part of the story.
Dr Susan Owens is an art historian and former V & A curator. Her books include Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers and the British Landscape (2020) and Imagining England’s Past (2023), both Thames & Hudson. She is now working on a book about drawing, for Yale University Press.