Ghosted Ground showcases the work of landscape artist Joanna Whittle together with documents from the National Fairground and Circus Archive. The exhibition is the result of a year-long research project funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, in which Joanna looked into the lives of Showmen and their movement through the landscape. In Ghosted Ground, Joanna explores otherness and un-connectedness whilst uncovering human themes of mourning, love and movement across the landscape. These landscapes are central to the stories being told on the movement of people and the traces they leave behind, where the landscape becomes haunted by their absence, a ghosted ground of echoes.

Joanna Whittle is a painter who works directly with landscape and archival sources and collections. She is a member of the Contemporary British Painting Society and shows work extensively nationally and internationally. Joanna is strongly committed to research, collaboration and engagement. Her landscape paintings consider fragility and transience in the landscape through small-scale paintings of fairground architecture and circus tents which create makeshift and unsettled worlds. Here temporary structures sit secretly in empty landscapes with lights gleaming under grey skies in these spaces of silence, where the entertainment exists only as a temporary segment of these worlds before they sink back into quietness.