Dimensions: support: 2600 x 4360 mm
Copyright: © Terry Setch | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: Here we have Terry Setch's large-scale painting, "Once upon a Time there was Oil III, Panel I." The chaotic brushstrokes and muted palette create a really unsettling mood. What do you see in this piece? Curator: I see an urgent commentary on environmental degradation. Given Setch's Welsh background, consider the impact of the oil industry on working-class communities and the landscape. Do you see the figures as victims or perpetrators within this narrative? Editor: I guess I hadn’t considered that perspective, but I see what you mean about his background influencing the work. Curator: Exactly. The personal is political, and art like this invites us to critically examine power structures and their consequences. Perhaps the "Once upon a Time" implies a lost innocence. Editor: That’s a powerful way to look at it. I’ll never see this painting the same way again. Curator: That’s the point, isn’t it? To challenge our assumptions and broaden our understanding.
Comments
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/setch-once-upon-a-time-there-was-oil-iii-panel-i-t03591
Join the conversation
Join millions of artists and users on Artera today and experience the ultimate creative platform.
The figure at the centre of this work is the artist carrying the carcass of a sheep washed down the Severn and deposited on the beach at Penarth, just south of Cardiff docks and across the Severn estuary from Hinkley Point nuclear power station. In the late 1890s, the English Impressionist Alfred Sisley painted bright views of the Bristol Channel from the cliff above Penarth beach. Terry Setch takes a different approach, treating the beach less as a scenic resource than as a perpetually evolving collision between nature and human industry. For thirty years now, he has been dragging his canvasses right out onto the beach, and including materials found there into the texture of his works. The memory of Sisley's unspoiled world persists in Setch’s paintings, but it is now mixed up with old cars, rubbish and other industrial debris. Once Upon a Time there was Oil III incorporates oil spilled from the tanker Amoco Cadiz, which ran aground off the shore of Brittany in 1978. Gallery label, September 2004
CollectMore like this
