A Gap in the Clouds, The Heong Gallery, 2025. Photograph: Jo Underhill
Jerwood Foundation is pleased to share additional exhibition context from The Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge, relating to the five Jerwood Collection works currently on loan to A Gap in the Clouds until 7 February 2026.
Five significant artworks from the Jerwood Collection have been loaned to the exhibition A Gap in the Clouds at The Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge. Curated by Elisa Schaar and Adina Drinceanu, A Gap in the Clouds explores how modern and contemporary artists use landscape as a way to navigate the relationship between our mental lives and the world around us. Neither distant views nor simple reflections of the mind, the works in the exhibition treat landscape as an active, imaginative space where inner and outer worlds meet, reflect, and reshape each other.
July Change (1929) by David Jones, as well as Paul Nash’s Spring Landscape (1914) and The Corner (1919), demonstrate the pull of landscape imagery for early twentieth-century British modernists, especially for those with first-hand experience of the trauma of the First World War, like Jones and Nash. Both artists explored landscapes not as neutral opportunities to experiment with artistic form, but as highly loaded containers of cultural memory, marking the borderlands between inner and outer worlds.
Spring Landscape, painted on the eve of the First World War, depicts a pastoral countryside under a striking beige sky. The unusual glowing colour of the background, along with hints of wind and rain, unsettles the calm scene, suggesting that upheaval is imminent. By contrast, The Corner, painted after Nash’s return from the front, suggests the war’s lingering presence. A fenced gate defines a space that is enclosed yet uncertain. Though on the surface these quiet watercolours appear far removed from the boom of the battlefield, Nash’s experience of war would markedly alter his engagement with landscape as subject matter, which took on an increasingly mystical, symbolic quality as his career progressed.
David Jones’ July Change depicts Eric Gill’s farmhouse in Piggots, Buckinghamshire, on the cusp of one of the Jones’ most fruitful periods of production. This productivity was partly unlocked by his development of a distinctive style of watercolour application through studying the hilly landscapes surrounding Gill’s community at Capel-y-Ffin, Powys. This style can be seen clearly in July Change: thin, unifying washes of colour patterned across the composition, wispy details added in faint, finer lines, and a loose, medievalising approach to perspectival recession. The Roman Catholic theology of Gill’s community combined with Jones’ own fascination with mythology and his experiences in the trenches led him to see all landscapes as sites layered with cultural memory and symbolism; a garden path had the potential to recall all homecomings from across history, be they literary, real, or spiritual.
Two further works on loan from the Jerwood Collection reveal the potential for landscape imagery to blend into abstraction: Peter Lanyon’s Sharp Grass (1964) and Rachel Howard’s You Can Save Me (2015). In both these works, abstracted landscapes reveal the fine line between the experience of the external world and psychological state. Sharp Grass is one of Lanyon’s later works produced after he took up gliding, conveying the vertigo and exhilaration of seeing the world from above. Gouache and charcoal form rapid, cutting gestures that evoke blades of grass caught in shifting winds. The landscape seems to be in motion, conveying to the viewer the thrill and anxiety of being in flight.
You Can Save Me returns us to earth with a much stiller abstracted setting, featuring an ambiguous horizon that suggests a boundary between water and sky. This horizon, like the “you” invoked in the title, offers the potential for orientation—a stabilizing presence against the instability of mind and emotion—without ever guaranteeing it. The title introduces an open-ended call: a plea, a question, or a demand, which transforms the landscape into a space of relational and psychological significance. Coastal horizons are a recurrent feature of Howard’s work, suggesting how the same landscape can fluctuate in tune with our internal, mental landscapes, whilst remaining a reassuring anchor.
A Gap in the Clouds invites viewers to reflect on their own inner lives and environments by revealing the ways that artists have long navigated the boundary between real and psychological terrain—not to offer cure, escape, or solace, but to hold space for tension, uncertainty, and resilience. Landscape emerges as a vital space of emotional resonance and creative possibility.
Text © The Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge. Reproduced with permission.
December 3, 2025
