The edge of the lawn (The Lost Estate), Daniel & Clara. Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal archival paper, 106cm x 72cm, 2024
Twilight in the Garden
By Martin Gayford‘That day’, Daniel & Clara recall, ‘it was pouring down with rain. The camera was under an umbrella. We set the timer and rushed into frame’. Then the shutter clicked, and the result was ‘A sudden downpour’, one of twelve images which make up a series: The Lost Estate. But of what, you might ask, is this series made up? These are obviously photographic images, but it’s equally clear they are not snaps documenting everyday life in the manner of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus or Martin Parr. Rather, in ‘A sudden downpour’ and all the other images, the people – always played by the artists themselves – seem involved in some drama, intense yet hard to define.
So one answer to the question ‘What are these pictures?’ might be: a sequence of unscripted tableaux. As Daniel & Clara say, the postures of the two figures were improvised at high speed. The subjects too were extemporaneous, in the sense that each arose from chance circumstances. Another of the most striking pictures in the series is ‘The edge of the lawn’. It features an extremely dead, and decaying, chicken which was, to use art jargon, a ‘found object’. Daniel & Clara discovered it on their first morning’s exploration of the Norfolk country house where they created The Lost Estate. ‘We were walking through part of the garden and the chicken was lying there, just beyond the lawn. It seemed so powerful – and gruesome – that we felt we really had to do something with it.’ Of course, death and decay are a perennial subject in western art, from the grand guignol of gothic tomb sculptures to Damien Hirst. Likewise, the theme of human beings interacting with a tamed and domesticated natural world goes back as early, perhaps, as the beginnings of agriculture.
Each picture in The Lost Estate features a male and a female in a garden: another time-honoured subject. ‘We continuously return to the narrative of Adam, Eve and the expulsion’, Daniel & Clara explain, ‘This moment when they leave the garden and become displaced figures wandering the landscape, searching for belonging, searching for home, for some kind of connection.’ They continue: ‘The 20th century British painter Stanley Spencer was someone we found ourselves thinking about a lot. His work is full of people standing in quite unusual, awkward postures, their bodies full of tension’. Spencer staged episodes from the New Testament in the Berkshire village of Cookham, rather as Daniel & Clara relocated the Biblical Fall to rural East Anglia. However, the titles of the pictures in The Lost Estate come from a very different text, though in its way also a canonical one: Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927). ‘We went through it and chose lines which seemed to activate possibilities for scenes and situations, phrases that intuitively felt relevant to the moods and atmospheres we were trying to conjure: Morning disturbances, A last look around, Everything they wanted.’
This side of the wall (The Lost Estate), Daniel & Clara. Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal archival paper, 106cm x 72cm, 2024
Another source for The Lost Estate was the cinema, or at least the art-house variety. Daniel & Clara are drawn to movies, often from the 60s and 70s, in which the story-line is more implied than explicit. Marguerite Duras’ India Song, which has been described as an ‘elliptical dream poem’, is a favourite. In this film from 1975 the characters, never speaking, wander around the rooms and grounds of a grand country mansion – much like Daniel & Clara in The Lost Estate. ‘We didn’t start by taking photographs’, they point out, ‘We began by making films. And because cinema always deals with narrative, the psychological dimension is very much part of the photographic image in cinema’. ‘When we started making photos it was always in series. We’d never just make one picture, it was always 10, or 30 or 100. When we started this project we immediately had a feeling that we had to make 12.’ Of course, India Song is a series of moving pictures, whereas The Lost Estate is a portfolio of stills. But, as David Hockney has argued, both belong to a wider category: pictures. So too do paintings, drawings, prints and every other attempt to depict the three dimensional world on a two dimensional surface.
‘Clearly’, Daniel & Clara point out, ‘our work is deeply rooted in the history of painting more than the history of photography.’ When they began studying the collection at Norwich Castle Museum, they were struck by the paintings of John Crome (1768 – 1821). ‘The thing we immediately responded to was his interest in burdock leaves or flints, the way he was giving enormous attention to these almost insignificant aspects in empty corners of the landscape.’ This way of combining microcosm and macrocosm in a single image goes back to the Renaissance. Giorgione’s Il Tramonto (The Sunset) from around 1510 depicts two human figures in the middle distance, with such unconsidered trifles as wisps of grass, wildflowers and stray chunks of stone shown much closer to the viewer, in great detail.
However, even if images made with a camera and those created by hand with paint and brushes belong ultimate to the same family, the technical difficulties of making them obviously differ. For a painter, to depict objects in the foreground and distance with equal clarity presents no special problem. For a photographer it does. Most pictures taken by a camera have a more or less narrow depth of field. If someone had taken ‘A sudden downpour’ with their phone, either the gigantic artichoke towering in the foreground like a plant in a primeval forest would have been in sharp focus, or the two figures in the background. Here both are equally crisp, because, as Daniel & Clara describe, the pictures which make up The Lost Estate were taken with ‘a split-focus lens’. This is ‘a half lens which goes in front of the main lens’, this allowing ‘the camera to have two focal planes within one image’. The resulting effect is closer than most camera pictures to the way we human beings actually perceive the world. We cannot simultaneously look at objects close to us and far away with equal precision – but we can alternate rapidly between the two.
Nonetheless, the split-focus effect is disorientating. Daniel & Clara note that it was ‘used a great deal in 1970s cinema, particularly in horror films and crime films, by directors such as Brian de Palma.’ It has a ‘slightly jarring’ effect, they go on, ‘the foreground and the distance are in focus but you get this strange zone in between which is soft and mysterious’. The mood of The Lost Estate is enigmatic in another way. Most of the pictures were taken at sunrise or sunset – times of day when the light becomes poignant and atmospheric. (Giorgione’s Sunset was one of the very first pictures to take this mood as its key note.)
Exhibition view of Daniel & Clara: The Lost Estate, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 2024. Photo by David Kirkham.
Although, as we’ve seen, The Lost Estate is not straightforwardly ‘about’ the Biblical narrative of the Fall, this story remains a powerful metaphor for Homo sapiens’ relationship to the rest of nature – which is one of the reasons Daniel & Clara were drawn to it. Their implied point in The Lost Estate is both existential and environmental. As they put it: ‘the moment of Adam and Eve's expulsion is when they come into consciousness of the nature of the world and their impact on it, it is also about their awakening to life as being in a state of continuous becoming.’ They continue: ‘All life in a way is an expression of creative energy. Making art about nature you are continuously seeing that no two moments are the same. Working on these pictures, we would find ten seconds later when we tried another exposure the light had already changed, or maybe the plants had moved, creating a different mood and speaking of different things. The world is continuously transforming and re-creating itself.’
What’s more, one might add, artists constantly react to what they see around them – and of course are always in the pictures. In this too, Daniel & Clara – though their approach is fresh and contemporary – belong in a tradition. The fact that figures in their pictures are Daniel & Clara themselves links them with another artist duo of an earlier generation, Gilbert & George – who are also almost always visible in their own works (and have in turned linked themselves to predecessors such as Samuel Palmer). Another of David Hockney’s observations is that the history of pictures neither declines nor progresses, ‘it just goes on and on and on’. But, conversely, when it comes to a genre such as landscape, there’s always a new way to do it. Daniel & Clara have shown that with The Lost Estate.
Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic. His books include ‘Modernists and Mavericks’, ‘A History of Pictures’ (with David Hockney), ‘Shaping the World’ (with Antony Gormley), and ‘Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939–1954’ (with David Dawson), all published by Thames & Hudson.