Est: Collected reports from East Anglia

From the Introduction

At a gallery talk by one of the contributors to this volume, the artist Luke Elwes, a question was raised as to his method of painting landscape. In an eloquent and thoughtful response, Elwes described how in his work he attempts to avoid the ‘tyranny of the horizon’. What does this mean? It means, perhaps, that as an artist he is not seeking to produce work that represents a totality of viewpoint.

Horizons mark an edge. They encourage the definitive. With Est we too want to avoid totalities. This is no definitive account of an East Anglian geography or sensibility. Indeed, what this collection demonstrates is nothing more than what East Anglia possibly might have been like in the minds of some writers at the moment. There is nothing definite here. What suggests fact or reality is hardly more than a surreality. The reports are a circumlocution of a land that both exists and does not exist. They look outward to the Continent and beyond; inward to an empty hinterland. They are about East Anglia, and they are not.

Martin Bewick 2015

See full text of interview with the artist here