ORIGINS spans six decades of Hambling’s work, bearing witness to the artist’s deep connection with Suffolk and inviting a meditation on the universal relationships between self and environment, people and place.
Comprised of around 30 works, the paintings and drawings in ORIGINS express a combination of exterior reality and interior life. Portrayals of people and places carry a sense of longer time: the unfolding of life, the workings of memory, the evolution of love, and the inescapable proximity of life to death – a theme that recurs throughout Hambling’s art. Suffolk links the artist’s early and present lives – she was born in Sudbury in 1945, she grew up in Hadleigh and has lived in rural Suffolk since the late 1990s.