Ange Mullen-Bryan

“My paintings take their inspiration from the lakes, forests and skies of a vast Swedish landscape and a very particular Nordic light. This is where they begin like snapshots from a road trip or plotted points on a map.

A solitary hunting hide beside a forest road, thistly with dry branches, its spikes like a feathered nest. Solemn snowscapes have long shadows and fierce pink skies. Whole skies reflected in wide lakes and deep, endless, forest.  Hot lupins, dark pines, dripping lakes and quiet fires. The distant echoes of the groaning, warping and thumping of a lake trapped under ice.

This is a land where the imagination runs away and the uncanny resides, where the real and imagined co-exist.

I am enticed by precarious boundaries, where land meets lake and light meets dark. In these unsteady places you are neither at risk nor safe, but feel both at once.

I weave threads of paint onto coloured linens and canvases and make exaggerated, luminous landscapes. I invite an escape into a kind of utopia, where you can smell freedom and pine in the air, a place I think I know. Yet these paintings tell darker tales of tension, foreboding and longing, I dress them up in the fabric and costume of colour and light.” - Ange Mullen-Bryan 2021

Rachel McDONNELL

“For so long, as we evolved as a species, the natural environment has been bigger than us. Its growth, lives and death have been little affected by mankind. In recent centuries, however, the balance has shifted, and the impact of our actions upon the world have become all but overpowering, consisting not only of direct effects (such as cutting down a tree), but also indirect ones (such as climate change or acid rain). My paintings seek to explore these ideas, to celebrate the beauty and fragility of our environment, and its role as barometer and victim of what we are doing to the world which supports us. More optimistically, I also believe the environment itself may offer one of the best solutions to our global predicament.

Almost two years ago, when the world was quite a different place, I travelled with my family and our Stroud based Finnish friends through the Turku archipelago to the Åland Islands. These islands, in the Baltic, between Finland and Sweden, have provided the inspiration for a whole series of paintings, with their delicate mosses overlaying lumps of pinkish granite, providing the beginnings of soil for the shallow roots of trees. Most of the islands are low-lying, and it struck me that a relatively small rise in sea level might lead to the disappearance of this extraordinary, beautiful landscape. I hope, by sharing an appreciation for special places such as this, through my work, to make a small contribution to a feeling of connection with them, which might in turn precipitate a tiny shift towards changing how we look after the place which is, in the end, essential to us all.” - Rachel McDonnell, 2021

ABIGAIL REED

“Walking last winter and following deserted pathways in vast pine forests, I felt I was ‘walking amongst giants’, a chance to be taken outside of myself, forget my own worries and be lost in nature. As winter dragged on, I started to seek out transformative moments like walking up a steep hill and being shrouded in mist or walking at dusk to find the setting sun, whether it was being reflected off an impassable puddle or casting its warmth over a snowy track. A local quarry, a desolate area abandoned after use, has become a place of hope as young silver birch trees populate it and nature thrives in the absence of human life. I kept walking and following the different pathways, ‘finding the light’, seeing where it took me, and it became a metaphor for getting through the long dark months.

Many photographs were taken on these walks, capturing these places in time, still viewpoints in our rapidly changing world that are then translated into drawings back in my studio. Rich compressed charcoal is layered heavily on the paper, light extracted with fingertips and a combination of erasers cut small to capture detail, thin sticks of willow charcoal are used with extreme precision to draw the fragile saplings trying to grow. Once drawn a sense of belonging to the land is enhanced, you can be fearless losing yourself in the shadows, and by seeking light, a sense of optimism is found.” - Abigail Reed, 2021

KATE SHERMAN

"Around ten years ago I was working on a series of road paintings from photographs that I would take on journeys. The roads I painted were often edged with trees, and gradually the focus of the works changed from the actual road to the view alongside the road. There was something very interesting to me about the neglected often overlooked areas of woodland that you find on the edge of roads, something drew me to them and made me want to investigate and pursue them further. So then I started painting the trees and wooded areas alongside the road. These were sometimes blurred with the motion of the vehicle I was travelling in when I took the photo.

I find woodlands to be quite mysterious places; they can feel eerie, or threatening, or entirely tranquil and safe, or all of these things at once. I like the ambiguity of that.

The tree species that I have chosen to focus on so far have each had particular qualities that drew me to them on a more formal, painterly level. With the birch it was specifically tone, with their pale, silvery colour and how this changes depending on the ambient light and surrounding colours, which would be influenced by time of day, weather, season etc. The pines that I have been working on recently are more about form, focusing on the play of the positive/negative shapes (of the trees' branches), and emphasizing the abstract qualities inherent in this. Also in these paintings I am less interested in realistic colour renditions, but looking for a more emotional atmospheric response." - Kate Sherman, 2021