LARA COBDEN
INCANTATIONS OF LIGHT

Irving Contemporary is delighted to present INCANTATIONS OF LIGHT, a solo show of new paintings by contemporary artist Lara Cobden (5th to 26th November 2022).

Lara Cobden (b. 1971) is a British painter living and working in Norwich, Norfolk. Lara graduated with a degree in Painting at Brighton University in 1996, and then spent eleven years living in Ireland before relocating to East Anglia. Predominately a landscape painter, focusing on memory and sense of place, her work is a response to the natural world around her.

Lara is a member of The Arborealists, a group of artists specialising in the art of trees, who exhibit widely across Europe. In 2019-20 she completed a year on the Turps Banana Correspondence Course, a highly regarded programme of one-to-one online mentoring. Lara's work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally, and she has been a recipient of a number of awards, including the Parker Harris Mentorship Prize at the 2018 Wells Arts Contemporary Art Awards, 2nd place in the 2019 Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, the Chair’s Purchase Prize in the 2019 ING Discerning Eye exhibition, and most recently she was a finalist in the 2020 John Moores Painting Prize, at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool.

INCANTATIONS OF LIGHT features a collection of recent paintings on gesso panel, linen, and paper, mostly made between the spring and autumn of 2022. Spellbound by those fragments of time where light transcends the everyday, the mundane, and an everyday scene is elevated to one of significance, Lara's work is an attempt to collect these experiences - a fleeting moment, light and shadows, ephemeral and yet enduring. These landscapes dance between reality and dream, drawing on nature and invention, fact and fiction.

“Incantations of Light is a collection of paintings mostly made between Spring and Autumn 2022.

Spellbound by those fragments of time where light transcends the everyday, the mundane, and an everyday scene is elevated to one of significance.

Painting is an attempt to collect these experiences - a fleeting moment, light and shadows, ephemeral and yet resilient in their presence - to catch them in a gossamer net. These landscapes dance between reality and dream, drawing on nature and invention, fact and fiction.

Increasingly reliant on our world being illuminated throughout its turn of the axis, we are saturated by unnatural light, there is a scarcity of darkness. It is a rare joy to gaze under dark skies and bathe in natural light: starlight, sunlight, moonlight, leaflight, cloudlight, firelight, and to appreciate the darkness.

Being in the natural world serves to elevate my spirit and painting in the studio is a meditative process of letting the light take over. Pattern and repetitive marks build up and get erased to finally arrive at an unknown destination - a pathway to somewhere vaguely familiar and etched in my memory bank.

Time spent in nature, away from light pollution, has given me time and space to appreciate the elixir of natural light and the magic of total darkness: to gasp at shooting stars during the Perseid meteor showers, to sit transfixed as the full moon rises slowly over a tranquil sea, to gather with friends round a bonfire, transported to other worlds dancing in the flames, to sun gaze as the last golden rays slide through the trees on a summer’s evening, and to wish on a slither of a crescent moon with the promise of a new month ahead.

These are moments when magic seems possible, quietly listening and imbibing - Incantations of Light.”

— Lara Cobden