Our Winter Selection brings together works that explore the connections between place and memory. Among the exhibition’s highlights are new works by Charlotte Evans and Calum McClure, drawing on landscapes from Ontario’s freshwater lakes to the Austrian border and the waterways of Venice.
For Charlotte Evans, watching her children grow up in Canada brings memories of her own British childhood into focus. Lakeside cabins, afternoons on the water and encounters with wildlife prompt reflections on the freedoms of childhood and the subtle differences between generations and countries. In Nettles and Butterflies, memories of roaming through fields of stinging nettles sit alongside her children’s familiarity with poison ivy and wild parsnip. In Patience, salmon resting in Toronto’s Humber River recall her father’s stories of trying to tickle trout in North Wales, connecting three generations through landscape, storytelling and a shared love of the outdoors.
Calum McClure’s work begins with an equally attentive response to his surroundings in Italy. A view north towards Austria from near his studio continues his exploration of borders. His painting and monotype inspired by Gibigiana, a Milanese word describing reflected light, turn to Venice: the shifting reflections beneath bridges and within crevices, and the accumulated layers of masonry and crumbling paint.
Across these works, familiar surroundings offer starting points for wider reflection, revealing how places hold traces of personal histories, passing time and lives beyond our own.
The exhibition also includes paintings by Kerry Harding who responds to the seascapes of Cornwall and Pippa Blake responding to Sussex and New Zealand, whose responses to landscape extend these explorations of place and atmosphere. Harding’s To Lundy and The Wind is Never Weary sit alongside Blake’s Night garden Sussex and Rangitopuni works.
Adding in some abstarction, Celia Cook’s Vamp and Ostinato works bring a contrasting abstract rhythm to the selection, opening up further conversations between colour, form and movement.
