Simon Periton National Geographic

Periton mixes utopianism with historical realities. The stencilled countercultural visual language of his paintings recall the visual language of punk and protest banners, suggesting a negative view of efforts to contain and fence, particularly in a political moment when questions around migration, freedom of movement and hydrocarbon exploration are at the forefront of political debates across the globe. Representative of these concerns is Silver Jack, 2025. In this a kind of Green Man figure – commonly found carved into medieval churches across Britain – is inverted, becoming a carceral mask representing enclosure rather growth and rebirth.

Periton’s leaves could in turn be understood as a kind of barrier, mimicking the hedgerows which bound agricultural land and the countryside. In this sense, questions of ownership, or how power is inscribed in space, are at the heart of the installation. Periton’s titles – National Geographic, Manifest Destiny, Peartree Farm, International Anthem – refer to politics, anthropology and settler colonialism. Visually, Manifest Destiny refers obliquely to John Gast’s painting American Progress (1872). This depicts Columbia, a figure representing ‘progress’, guiding settlers across America as indigenous people flee, laying a telegraph wire as she goes. In Periton’s work, the line becomes a crown of barbed wire. In contrast, International Anthem, with its symbolically broken chain, references The Internationale, a song adopted by the socialist movement in the late nineteenth century, and also artist Gee Vaucher’s DIY publication, issues of which were distributed at the concerts of activist punk band Crass (1977–1984) that Periton attended as a teenager.