The Big Country

Chambers is not new to the grand scale, having worked on backdrop designs for the Royal Opera House, but in terms of printmaking this work represents a departure from his regular practice and not one without considerable risk. Rather than attempt a large print on a single sheet, Chambers has adopted the strategy of building the work from numerous individual sheets following in the footsteps of such as Dürer whose monumental woodcut, The Triumphal Arch of Emperor Maximilliam I was made from 192 separate blocks, measuring almost ten metres squared.

The Big Country takes its title from the William Wyler’s 1958 film of the same name starring Charleston Heston and Gregory Peck and provides the key to its genesis. This is an image that owes its origin to that genre of Hollywood movies, The Western and the recurring theme of the opening up of America by prospectors and pioneers. It also draws from personal experience: journeys made by Chambers across the USA where he experienced the vast open spaces, those in-between places which he describes as “a wilderness big enough to be lost in and then somewhere would be a tumbledown cabin’ evidence of those early settlers. These cabins, now in various states of decay, speak of the harshness of lives in such an unforgiving landscape where each person would be dependent on their own resources for survival and the nearest neighbour, days travel away.

A Big Country has been a year in the making although one suspects this is a project that has been slowly coming to focus over a much longer period. It represents a bringing together of motifs that Chambers has explored in individual prints and paintings but here what comes across is the attempt to map his vignettes both an imaginary landscape but also one suspects an inner landscape and a sense of the isolated nature of existence.

The work has been drawn up on a one to one scale in ink on paper. Its grown as Chambers poetically states ” like a coral’ working on individual sheets of paper, the drawing crossing over from one sheet to the other. In appearance the final format resembles a crossword puzzle, the sheets providing a grid against which the narrative is played out. There are also gaps, empty spaces that serve to jar against the lyricism of the piece, suggesting either that this might be ” to be continued’ or that these are spaces like on a map, still to be discovered.

” I like the idea that the big country will echo the crossword format. The invitation to fill the gaps sits well with a refusal to complete the narrative, or even acknowledge that one exists at all. Crosswords are a silent insight into the compiler’s mind…’ (1)

This open ended approach coupled with the enigmatic nature of the characters and imagery that populate the piece, makes it hard to assimilate on first viewing and is certainly a work that gains with repeated visits.

At the centre is an image which crosses dozen of sheets and describes a community, dwellings in the form of clinker built houses and barns, some either wrecked or being built, set amongst trees. The space in-between each building create a separateness, these are neighbours but at a distance. Into this, silhouette figures, described by Chambers as ” woodland folk ” are caught like stills in a film, a horse startled by a dog, throws its rider, a woman is startled by an open coffin, a man on his horse with his two children seem to be receiving directions. All of these events are played out beneath stylised trees whole delicate foliage acts to provide a transparency through which each scenario links to another.