James Ireland is concerned with how culture and economics shape our perception of the environment. His work references idealised landscapes with sunsets, blue skies, mountain ranges and waterfalls, but processes them through the materials of our developed, cultivated world. He is deeply engaged with the idea of landscape and how culture defines and represents it. Ireland’s works are often generated through the arrangement of natural materials and industrial massproduced objects, such as plastic bags, posters, concrete, polystyrene, and metal display structures. With their quality to reflect and frame the environment, mirrors and translucent surfaces also play an important role, prompting the viewer to contemplate the meaning and aesthetic of natural and artificial environments.
You Get What You Desire, You Take What You Want, You Wait For No One has been built as a structure to distil formal conventions of landscape into an architectural device. The interlocking frames delineate the spaces and viewers around it, producing a structure to view through and to be viewed in. The screens reflect back that desiring gaze as well as the context within which the structure is placed. At the same time, the filters impose their saturated digital colours over representations of a clear blue sky and an orange tinted sunset or sunrise onto that space.
You Get What You Desire, You Take What You Want, You Wait For No One, gifted to The Whitworth by Michael and Philippa Bradley, connects with The Whitworth’s collection and the gallery’s physical context. The Whitworth has a sustained interested in the artistic and cultural preoccupation with landscape – drawn in part from the 1892 founding gift of watercolours and the gallery’s position as the first British ‘gallery in a park’. More specifically, the relationship of the gallery’s architecture – from its original nineteenth century building or its 1960s modernist interior and the recent renovation – has focused attention on the relationship between landscape and modernism. Ireland’s work ties in with this relationship and contributes to The Whitworth’s rethinking of the socially constructed landscape in the urban environment.
