James Ireland

James Ireland’s work references signs of an idealised landscape: sunsets, blue skies, untainted faraway lands, a lone tree or organic patterns such as twigs and crystal formations. However, the works are situated firmly within our cultivated world, where the romantic view of landscape is yet another product.

By meticulously arranging simple, easily recognizable domestic and mass produced objects, such as lights, plastic bags, mirrors, book pages, steel components and concrete blocks into assemblages and installations, the epic is created out of very little, providing brief glimpses of perfect idyllic views.

Whilst refusing a coherent representational concept of landscape, Ireland is deeply engaged with representation and the mass of culture that defines it, ‘the work is about how the world we do live in produces a desire for a world we don’t live in’, he explains.

In 2005 Ireland participated, with several other artists, in the Zoo Portfolio, a curated portfolio of works published by Archeus and sold to raise funds for the Zoo Art Fair for emerging artists. His work has since been included in exhibitions at 176, the Zabludowicz Collection, London, Haunch of Venison, Berlin and the Contemporary Art Society, London. In 2007 his work You Mistake My Horror for Love was exhibited in the Economist Plaza, London.