Ben Malcolmson

Lands In-between

Ben Malcolmson & Kwok Tsui, exhibited at QSS, 2022

In Lands In-between, we see two artists engaged in deep play with the traditions of landscape image-making and the questions about space and representation that the genre of landscape asks. In Kwok Tsui’s canvasses, we find familiar elements of landscape painting — here the jagged line of a horizon, here a bird, here a curve that may well describe a sun setting or rising — but reduced to flat symbols and arranged in entirely fictive spaces, like scenery on a stage or a place only half-remembered. And our imaginative movement into these spaces he creates is always arrested by his complication of the painted surface with veils of thin white paint or lines that float above the image divorced from representation. Like Kwok, Ben Malcolmson invites us to pay attention to the surface of the image as we look through it to the space it denotes. In Malcolmson’s photographs, the irregular recesses and protrusions of the rocky places the photographs represent are both divested of their legibility and made literal by the crumpling of the paper they are printed on. In his video work, two projected images coexist or compete on the same surface and abolish the thousands of miles between the places they were filmed. These artists, in their reflexive engagement with the spatial mechanics of the traditions and mediums in which they work, offer new ways of thinking about our movement through the material world.

Text by Padraig Regan, 2022

Commissioned text: Padraig Regan, 2022, Padraig Regan is a poet and essayist from Belfast. Their first collection Some Integrity was published by Carcanet in 2022 and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. They are the author of two previous poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive and Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). They received an Eric Gregory Award in 2015, an Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award in 2020, and the Clarissa Luard Award in 2021. They hold a Phd on creative-critical and hybridised writing in the works of Anne Carson and Medieval Texts from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University Belfast, where they were one of the Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellows in 2021.