Hinterlands is a two-person exhibition of new landscape work by MAP6 member photographer Aaron Yeandle and painter Fiona Richmond. The title refers to the land immediately next to or inland from the coast, but it is also applied in a more metaphorical sense, to that which is beyond the visible or known.
The understanding of ‘landscape’ has shifted in recent years, away from the ‘objectifying’ vision of landscape as representation, or as a base upon which humans live and act. It has been replaced with a concern with the materiality of landscape, using landscape as a context through which people live and move, and where the land itself has agency. Landscape is often a potent carrier of memory and identity, as well as a conveyor of emotions, capturing and embodying how the artist feels in the world.
Yeandle and Richmond both spend time in the landscape before creating work, experiencing the constantly shifting, moving and darkening terrain which sometimes confounds normal perception. As well as recognising the beautiful and sublime, their work shares an interest in the ‘spirit of place’ and a recognition of those abandoned sites that are on the margins.
Hinterlands is an exhibition that invites its audience to look at the landscape through fresh eyes, particularly sites that are overlooked. This may be the overgrown skeletal remains of greenhouses and packing sheds; the self-seeded valerian or Mexican fleabane in the high granite walls of St Peter Port; or the scrubby areas of coastal terrain often traversed en-route to the picturesque. In these more unruly areas, nature find space, holds sway and fights back over the dominance of human intervention.
Aaron Yeandle is interested in how realism, romanticism and the imagination can be juxtaposed to create a playful yet ominous narrative, which tells a compelling visual story. His body of night photographs work as ‘portraits’ of isolated trees, hedgerows and rock formations, plus human structures such as water towers, fortifications and Neolithic menhirs. The enigmatic forms loom out of the darkness of their surrounds.
Fiona Richmond’s recent work makes connections between places, memories and perception, working intuitively between drawing, abstraction and figuration. In her landscapes we find the human structures built in it; these often stand in for something else. The German-built fortresses become overgrown and derelict monuments to the histories buried in the landscape, concealing the traumas of war, displacement and slave labour. Her work explores the interconnectivity between humanity and the natural world, our social history, belief systems and practices, and the slippages between the known and unknown.
The Hinterlands exhibition in Guernsey is a joint collaboration between painter Fiona Richmond and photographer Aaron Yeandle
The exhibition runs from Friday, 27th March until Saturday, 18th April 2026.
Open daily throughout the Easter holidays between 10am and 4pm.
The Gate House Gallery, Elizabeth College, Guernsey.
