Ange Mullen-Bryan | These Wilder Things

Artist statement

“I am interested in the idea of a painting being a threshold, a brink, an edge. A step into somewhere else. When you row very close to a tiny island in the middle of a vast lake. It feels like another world all its own, very separate from the world inside the boat and on the water. You climb from the boat onto the granite rock and suddenly in that moment you are in a transformed place, close together but utterly different. It is these adjacent realities, sitting so close together, that fascinate me. The edges of worlds within our own. The moment when you slip under water and swim out into the lake, head low in the cool water, swimming into the view, into the horizon, towards the island of pine trees a mile away.

These edges are somehow describing our connect with landscape and nature, our barefoot on the grass, our bodies immersed in water, our palms on warm granite rock.

Something is being lost and I am trying to hold onto it. I am at once in it, and outside of it, feeling it and watching from another place.

Here lies a romanticism and nostalgia in the work, of trying to capture moments, like photos from the car window on a road trip years ago, as the sunset slips away.

Maybe the fact that I paint Sweden is just by chance. I could possibly have found a similar experience in many remote places. Yet it was such a pivotal moment for me, when I arrived there aged nineteen. After a long drive we pulled up beside dense forest on a gravel road. I hauled my suitcase over moss-covered rocks through old forest to the clearing beside a lake which housed some small red cabins. This is where I would stay for the next month and where I would subsequently return every year. My first experience of a place apparently without fences and footpaths. My young son more recently observed ‘there aren’t any walls in Sweden’. It was my first taste of a sort of unbridled wilderness, where you could lose yourself in a forest or row onto a vast lake and be truly alone in the landscape.

The Swedish freedom to roam the land (Allemansratten or everyman’s right) made this place feel like it belonged to everyone, such a difference to this British landscape I had grown up in, where it felt like every inch of the landscape is owned and farmed, or peopled and paved.  This particular kind of freedom and connectedness to the landscape quietly transformed my outlook and I have been trying to visually document this feeling ever since. Returning to Sweden year on year for over 25 years, reiterating my own connection to this place, learning from this closeness to land and rhythms of nature, that the people I grew to know and love, have. Exploring what it is to understand where the mushrooms choose to erupt from the forest floor and how the moisture in the spring effects how the blueberries fruit in the summer. I happened to feel this sense of wilderness so profoundly and for the first time in Sweden, and now I look for it everywhere.

There is an intimacy with nature, that I cling to. I note it, I describe it, scribbling down knowledge of land and lake held by old minds and lost to dying generations. It is barely there, nearly already gone.

 Over those 25 years we have come to understand, all over the wider world, that our disconnect from nature is the disaster. Our witness to its destruction has become ever more painful. Our grief for its loss, ever more palpable. This notion of loss and longing haunts my work. A melancholy for the separation, a sadness for the disconnect.

My paintings of wilderness, lakes and forests cannot help but reference the climate crisis that we now face, they never really could.

August 2023

I cling to the dying embers of a day. The melancholy of a sunsets glow. Holding onto light.

The whisper of moments past, fleeting, intangible, lost.

Burn, glow, chase. The melancholy of innocence lost, a simplicity gone.

The mystery of twilight and lost stories, unknown writers, tales gone untold, all things lost and sunk.

The emptiness and the meaning that I can only find in hard rock, clear water, naked skies and skin.

Always chasing a passing light, a briefest glimpse.

A constant grasping, trying to hold on. A nostalgia for a distant shore, remote and out of reach.

- Ange Mullen-Bryan, 2023

‘There is indeed something spiritual in vistas and horizons, an existential reminder, a poetic dimension to the distances that anchor us to the place we are. These vistas anchor us in time as well, fixing our gaze, and the mystery of distance becomes almost sacred. When a great panorama reminds us how little we know.’

Excerpt from ‘Landscape, the earths skin.’ By Janne Forsell on Bjorn Wessman