Sam Jacob: Repeal Enclosure

‘Repeal Enclosure' is a large-scale artwork by British architect Sam Jacob and is part of ‘A Call to the Commons’, a public art and architecture project that builds on the LFA 2023 theme ‘In Common’, featuring 6 newly commissioned posters by artists, architects and designers installed on billboards, fly posters and digital screens across London.

Repeal Enclosure takes as a starting point a quote by Gerrard Winstanley, the political / religious reformer who was born in 1609 who led the Civil War-era ‘Diggers’ movement that established communities across England to cultivate waste and common land. The quote has been collaged into a painting by Claude Lorrain, entitled ‘Landscape with Hagar and the Angel’. Lorrain’s paintings were among those that that provided the visual inspiration for the English picturesque, and the construction of the British landscape. Picturesque landscapes look natural but are far from it. They required tremendous wealth and intense labour: Villages were moved, rivers dammed to flood valleys, forests rearranged, all for the sake of a certain kind of view - views that looked like the paintings of Claude, Poussain and others.

These idealised and imaginary scenes had become popular with the English aristocracy and the paintings became blueprints for designers like William Kent and Capability Brown to create landscapes that looked like the paintings that their clients admired. All of this to give the appearance of nature. Or perhaps as a slight of hand to naturalise power into something so undebatable as idyllic nature itself.

The roots of the picturesque are not only aesthetic, they are legal too. The process of land enclosure began in earnest in the 17th century. Enclosure assembled what had previously been common lands, with common rights of access, grazing and growing. Between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual enclosure acts were passed, radically reorganising the English landscape. The beauty of the picturesque was only possible because of enclosure, its romantic beauty based on dispossession and exclusion.

The work is from Jacob’s ‘Against Nature’ series in which black geometric forms are inserted into found landscapes paintings. Their reworking suggests architecture’s symbolic and ritualistic power to summon new kinds of world and new ways of being in the world. To rearrange the world socially, politically, economically, and environmentally. Architecture as a conceptual act projected onto the land that contains the possibility of liberation, and the potential to reconstruct the home we have never had.

Guests are invited to visit site locations throughout June and on the evening of 20th June we invite you to attend a panel event to debate some of the themes around the 6 artworks produced.

Commissioned by Aldo Rinaldi and Rumi Bose, and sponsored by Build Hollywood and Cross River Partnership.