The works in this exhibition were made with the notion of territory and territoriality in mind. Using images and stories from Chilean history and the artist’s personal records, land‐workers, explorers, vagrants, migrants and tourists hover between soft layers of landscape, domesticity andabstract space.

Collectively, the paintings evoke the allegorical function of 19th century romantic landscape painting, owing Caspar David Friedrich in his pursuit of the sublime quality of landscape as a self contained emotive subject. As much as Pooley adheres to this approach to painting, her work is coloured by concern and perhaps a critique of how romanticism for "the natural" can become instrumentalised when territorial conflicts arise stirring up questions such as: what tools are used to point to the slippery notion of ownership and where are identities reallyto be found within the washes and waves of land use? The exhibition takes a step back from these fragile constructs to allow a dramatic tension to emerge, aesthetically leaning hard on Richter’s and Dumas’ relationship to the mediatised photograph.

In his book, We have Never Been Modern(1993) Bruno Latour addresses the overwhelming construction of hybrid systems that mix politics, science, technology and nature. He writes:

Whatever label we use, we are always attempting to retie the Gordian knot by crisscrossing, as often as we have to, the divide that separates exact knowledge and the exercise of power –let us say nature and culture. [1]

He argues for a redefining of the distinctions of modernity rather than an unpicking of what constitutes nature and culture per se. There is an echo of Latour’s concerns in Pooley’s work: in the entry points, blockades and dream-like layering of disparate spaces that open out to “promised lands”. This echo –coupled with a melancholy tie to the strange flattened distance that painting permits– makes aspace for feeling closer to the complex tensions between past and all too present concerns.