Made Ground

Yelena Popova produced a new group of paintings for Made Ground, for which she has used soil and rock that she collected locally to Cample. A new substantial painting installation, it continues and extends a wider body of work that Yelena calls ‘post-petrochemical paintings’, which she began in 2017 during a residency at Girton College, Cambridge, where she worked with gathered materials and natural pigments for the first time. Installed by Yelena in our upstairs space, these new paintings are to date her most sustained exploration of a place through soil, stone, pigment, gesture and colour.

Made Ground, the exhibition’s title, is the term used to refer to land where natural and undisturbed soils have largely been replaced by man-made or artificial materials. In developing her work for Cample, Yelena has drawn upon her interest in the relationship between geological depository and the kinds of artificial deposits or changes to land surface that are a legacy of local industries such as mining, particularly in agricultural landscapes such as Dumfries & Galloway’s. Mining for materials and mineral resources has happened across the region over centuries and while some remnants of this industrial activity are evident on the land and more obviously so in the built environment, other traces remain hidden from view underground in the soil.

Made Ground opened on 1 October 2022 and closed on 17 December 2022. 

Find out more herehttps://campleline.org.uk/yelena-popova/