Two different approaches to one subject

Paul Nash is name enough to draw an audience to an exhibition on his own.

As is Fay Godwin.

Together, they make a formidable duo – however, it seems difficult to find a reason why they would co-exist in an exhibition.

Nash was one of the most significant British painters of the early 20th century, his fame assured when he was recruited as an official

war artist during the First World War.

His work was appreciated by the War Propaganda Bureau and brought home the horrors of the trenches and the battlefields more viscerally than much of the contemporary photography could.

In between the two wars, he was one of the most significant painters of the British surrealist movement and when the Second

World War began, he was recruited once again as an official artist.

Godwin's career couldn't have been more different.

She began as a portrait photographer, producing images of a number of renowned literary figures, including Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing and

Kingsley Amis.

Her other passion was walking and she was a president of the Ramblers' Association – a pastime which brought her into contact with the British countryside which became a subject of her fascination and photography.

It is her photographs of the British landscape, and of the Yorkshire Moors in particular, that creates the link between her work and Nash's for the latest exhibition at Sheffield's Graves Gallery.

Alison Morton, Sheffield Museums' senior exhibitions curator, has brought together the two artists, using work owned by the Sheffield Museums' collection.

This latest exhibition continues a theme which has been running over the past year, concentrating on photography.

Paul Nash and Fay Godwin follows exhibitions featuring portrait photographs of comedians, work by Robert Mapplethorpe and a recent exhibition of photographs of writers.

While the common thread between Nash and Godwin is the British landscape, it will be interesting for visitors to see how the two approaches varied.

Morton says: "Fay Godwin's photographs concentrate far more on the atmosphere of the landscape.

"Her photographs are almost like these large canvases with the feel and the atmosphere of the British landscape being the dominating quality of the work. The photographs Paul Nash took were far more interested in the texture of the landscape and the feel of it. His work includes very detailed, close-up photographs of twisted trees and of ploughed fields. His work is far more concerned with the forms and shapes he found in the landscapes."

It begs the question, if the two approaches were so different, where did the idea come from to stage their work together?

Morton admits that the exhibition would probably not work if the photography of the two artists was mixed in the same area, but in a concession to the fact that they both saw very different things in the landscape, the exhibition is split over the two rooms of the Graves Gallery, with one room dedicated to the work of Godwin and the other to Nash.

Morton says: "While the work is quite different, there was one thing that did bind them and that was the fact that they were not interested in people in this photography. They weren't interested in showing people in the landscape, they were photographing the landscape for the sake of itself."

Much of the work on display by Godwin will be evocative to Yorkshire visitors, showing off at its dark and brooding best, the Yorkshire landscape.

The photographs are taken from a book Godwin published in 1979, the

work for which she said she would most like to be remembered.

The book, Remains of Elmet, featured not only Godwin's stunning photographs of the areas around Halifax, Keighley and Haworth, but also poetry written by Ted Hughes, inspired by the images.

"People will get a lot from the exhibition – the atmosphere of Godwin's photographs, the intricacy of Paul Nash's work reveals a lot about how he saw the world and the fact that they are being exhibited together will allow people to draw links and enjoy the work on that level, too," says Morton.

Paul Nash and Fay Godwin runs at the Graves Gallery until Nov 14.