Description
Downland is a unique collaboration celebrating the landscape of the North Wessex Downs as seen through the eyes of artist Anna Dillon and poet Jonathan Davidson. Featuring twenty paintings, this is the first extensive publication in book form of Anna Dillon’s vibrant and colourful work. The artworks are complemented by a series of poems from Jonathan Davidson, inspired both by the paintings and by the landscape. Taken together they form a kind of guidebook in paintings and poetry to the most popular stretch of The Ridgeway National Trail. The book includes a map pinpointing the locations that inspired the paintings and the poems.
The poems and paintings in Downland cover a distance of around 35 miles along The Ridgeway, one of Europe’s oldest tracks. Moving from Wiltshire just south of Swindon to where the River Thames cuts through the chalk escarpment in South Oxfordshire, the route passes extraordinary ancient sites, including Wayland’s Smithy and the Uffington White Horse. The views north look across to the towns of Wantage, Didcot and Wallingford and south towards the Kennet Valley Known variously as the White Horse Downs, the Berkshire Downs and the Wessex Downs, it is an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that has inspired writers and painters for centuries.
Locations featured in the paintings and poems include: Lammy Down; Wayland’s Smithy; Uffington; Ram’s Hill Coombe; Sparsholt Down; Segsbury Camp; Old Down; Bury Down; Lowbury Hill; Lid Hill; The Icknield Way; Unhill Woods and Kingstanding Hill.
Anna Dillon and Jonathan Davidson. Paperback, 200 x 200 mm, 68 pages, May 2024.
Anna Dillon was born in the market town of Wallingford (then Berkshire, now Oxfordshire) in 1972 and spent the first few years of her life in Wiltshire near Avebury before moving to South Oxfordshire where she still lives and works. Inspired by the ancient countryside of the British Isles she has been a professional artist since 2008 and has developed a vibrant signature style using bold and strong colour to reflect the form, contours and light of the land.
Jonathan Davidson was born in Oxford in 1964, and lived in Didcot, South Oxfordshire, from 1965 until the late 1980s. He is a widely published poet and writer, with a particular interest in how poetry is heard and in how poetry is experienced in the natural world. He lives in the English Midlands, but frequently returns to the Vale of the White Horse and the Berkshire Downs.
‘In the poems of Downland, language – like a lane or track through its rolling landscapes – finds horizons and lingers there, on the cusp of here and not-here, now and then, present and absent. Memories slip between human states and more-than-human places. The paths and the voices of the living mingle with those of the dead. Cumulative and contemplative, at once mature and playful, the effect is not solemn, but curious, alert, and quietly venturous.
Set alongside Anna Dillon’s striking paintings, to which they bear an invitingly open and oblique relation, Jonathan Davidson’s poems constitute a call both to move and to pause – and always to look, to listen, and attend more closely.’ — GREGORY LEADBETTER
Watch Anna Dillon and Jonathan Davidson in conversation on YouTube:
An edited and abridged transcript of the conversation is included in the book, and is also available to read here.
Listen to Jonathan Davidson reading two poems, both from Downland:
Watch a video of Anna Dillon talking about Juniper Hollow, which features in Downland as the subject of a painting and of a poem:
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