Obce nie-miejsca i obcy nie-na-miejscu. O pracach Juliana Opie i Ingrid Pollard
Foreign non-places and foreigner-in-place. The work of Julian Opie and Ingrid Pollard

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses representations of English rural landscape in the works of two British artists: Julian Opie and Ingrid Pollard. The analysis of Opie’s work entitled Imagine That You Are Moving (2001) employs the term of non-places, coined by Marc Auge. According to Auge’s definition, non-places are characterized by the lack of any link with history or identity. Opie’s set of light-boxes presenting stylized images of English low-land landscape, inserted in transfer zones of London’s Heathrow Airport, transforms the typical non-place of an airport into a place, which is characterized by a clear reference to a given context and identity. What is interesting is that for a representation of a typical English view Opie chose a rural low-land landscape, which is stereotypically perceived as quintessentially English. Similar representations of rural English landscape appear on photographs by Ingrid Pollard, who is a Black British artist born in Guyana. The photographs entitled Pastoral Interludes (1989) show the artist’s figure surrounded by landscape of the Lake District and are accompanied by text which comments on her feeling of unease resulting from being an “intruder” in the “white” countryside. Despite her strong attachment to the region of the Lake District and to the poetry of the Lake Poets, Pollard’s sense of Englishness is denied her due to the prevailing relation between nature and the accepted culture of Englishness which excludes her as a “foreigner”. The comparison between Opie’s and Pollard’s works suggests that Opie’s work, though it invests the non-place of an airport with given context and identity, does not take into account the specific exclusionary character of English rural landscape.

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