SOUP TALK: Sean Ketteringham and Iris Amizlev
Sean and Iris will discuss some new interpretations of land art in Britain and North America, and its association with ‘prehistoric’ Grizedale.
Sean will talk about his curation of ‘Passing Strange: British Land Art Through Time’, an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (18 July – 2 November, 2025). The display will highlight works by Tacita Dean, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, John Hilliard, and David Nash to consider how ideas of transition and ephemerality are used by these artists to defamiliarize landscape and natural forms.
Sean will share details of exhibition’s development and some of the limits and problems with the label ‘land art’. He will share a preview of the works to be displayed and how we might approach them in our contemporary moment of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis. The exhibition takes its title from Shakespeare’s Othello in which Desdemona describes Othello’s tales of adventure through extraordinary landscapes as ‘strange, passing strange’.
In her doctoral thesis, Iris focusses on the use of prehistoric references in Land art, noting formal and conceptual similarities with the Nazca lines, megalithic remains and the Hopewell and Adena mounds. Coinciding with the talk at Grizedale Arts and the presence of megalithic sites all over England, she will present examples of Land art associated with Stonehenge, Avebury, and other prehistoric sites, introducing the subject of archeoastronomy as well. Works by pioneering Land artists will be featured to reflect their common references to archaeological sites, including Americans Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Morris (1931-2018), British Richard Long (b.1945), and Canadian Bill Vazan (b.1933).
Sean Ketteringham is a historian and curator of twentieth-century British culture. He is a specialist in how modern literature, sculpture, and architecture has constructed English national and imperial identity. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and a visiting fellow at the Centre for British Studies at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin.
Iris Amizlev is Curator of Special Projects at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She has an M.A in Art History and a Ph.D in Art History in conjunction with Anthropology from the University of Montreal. Iris has researched and published extensively and curated numerous exhibitions in various institutions on her fields of expertise, including Contemporary, Pop and Land Art.
