‘Welcome to England’s Most Misunderstood County’, reads an imitation road sign inside the entrance to Firstsite gallery. It’s part of ‘The Essex Way’ (2021), a monumental collage commissioned from local boy Michael Landy to mark the 10th anniversary of the Colchester gallery’s opening. With its discombobulating mix of illustrations of native birdlife and views of landmarks such as the Veolia landfill site at Rainham, Landy’s mural is designed, like the gallery’s current exhibition series, to challenge assumptions about the county now most commonly associated with Towie.
A fellow visitor swore she could smell hay coming off a painting of a sunlit cornfield
The series started in 2021 with a show about the legendary East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, founded in Dedham before the war by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. This was followed in 2022 by a retrospective of Denis Wirth-Miller, a former student of Morris’s and a mucker of Francis Bacon’s who made Wivenhoe his home.
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