Shap Moors 1919

Editor: This is Oliver Hall’s Shap Moors, a landscape piece held at the Tate. The way the brushstrokes blend gives it a hazy, almost dreamlike quality. What can you tell me about it? Curator: Consider the materiality. Oil paint, commercially produced, enables Hall's expansive vision. But think about the labor—the mining of pigments, the milling of the paint, the weaving of the canvas, all contribute to this image. How does that affect our reading of the landscape itself? Editor: That’s interesting. It makes me think about how our perception of nature is always mediated. Curator: Precisely. And the scale suggests it was intended for display, for a consumer. A view of nature, commodified. Editor: I see it now. Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.