Crossing Boundaries

19 Oct-30 Oct 2022

PV 20 Oct 2022, 6-8pm

Overview

This exhibition presents a diverse group of contemporary female landscape painters, each innovating within the genre. The grouping of female painters directly addresses the significant gender disparity in this area of painting for centuries and up to the modern day. The history of painted landscapes has been dominated by the male perspective and this exhibition, seen entirely through the female gaze, helps form a more collective story. 

The artists examine the essential criteria, the recognisable truths, of landscape painting: techniques, concepts, aesthetic sensibilities & inherent relationship with the medium. They look at how the real meets the imagined, plein air versus studio, and how the specific and the abstract can interact. The exhibition also examines the relationship between experience and representation, such as restrictions on physical freedom & personal safety for women. All whilst contemplating the ongoing changes in the landscapes themselves.  

The artists have a variety of approaches to landscape painting.  

Joanna Whittle makes intimate paintings that touch on the sensuous handling of the romantics, whilst connecting with the history of miniatures. Her small almost hallucinogenic paintings are alongside the enveloping watery landscapes of Amanda Ansell whose work is similarly sensuous but handled abstractly via simple forms and wide overlays of colour.  

 Hannah Brown and Polly Townsend are embedded in the figurative traditions of British landscape painting but have different subject matter: Brown works with local parklands and familial rural settings, Townsend works in remote, high-altitude locations.  

Rebecca Partridge makes work that, on first glance appears abstract, but is acutely observed objective painting of sky, while Zoe Benbow accumulates fragments of observations to bring together the real and the imagined.  

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