Exhibitions and Events

Rewildings

Dorking Museum & Heritage Centre
26 May – 17 September 2022

Photography by Cristina Schek (cristinaschek.com)

Tracing routes between Leatherhead and Dorking this series of paintings offers a poetic meditation on ecological as well as emotional, spiritual, and mental forms of rewilding. Walking through forests, parks, and along the riverbanks of the Mole Gap Trail over the course of a year is the catalyst and inspiration for this series. Each work documents a small moment, observing the human interventions that create seemingly wild areas.

The paintings allude to the scattering of wildflowers, the care for plants on the riverbanks such as rare small teazel, and the planting of shrubs that allows wildlife to grow and thrive. The acts of walking and looking are themselves a form of rewilding, a freshening of the mind and soul, a spiritual journey that mimics that of the Romantic poets’ search for the self in nature. Among others, Keats journeyed to Box Hill, inspired by the quintessential English landscape in pursuit of a lyrical language.

These paintings are inspired by this Romantic approach to landscape, finding magical and metaphysical meaning in plants and flowers. The works are also indebted to Dutch Golden Age still life painting, a twist on a genre that preserves natural forms in various states of life and decay. Made using acrylic paint on poplar panels, the paintings use colour, tone and gestural line to create a sense of flowing movement.

This is a celebration of the beauty to be found upon close observation in the untamed and the rugged. Ultimately, this exhibition is a call to go outside, and rewild yourself.

Works on Paper

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Observed Imagined Remembered

Cass Art Space Kingston
19 March – 2 April 2022

An exhibition of paintings showing a range of approaches to image making across landscape and still life genres.

Photography by Cristina Schek (cristinaschek.com)

Taking the relationship between landscape and language as a starting point, these paintings use lyrical mark making to document space, form, and colour. Using a combination of painterly techniques, these works take observation and experience as their starting point, while using imagined and remembered forms and colour to extend them towards abstraction.

The exhibition includes several bodies of recent work, including a cycle of river portraits creating a durational charting of place through time and geography; a series of Grammatical Ornament paintings, inspired by Owen Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament, which return to nature as a method of generating new decorative language; and a series of still life works using dried flowers, using layers and gestural marks to create depth and complexity.

Daisy’s creative practice is a continuous development of a poetic language of line and colour. Taken individually, the works aim to capture the magic, light, and atmosphere of significant, familiar places. Together in series, the works become an act of narrative mapping and emotional, subjective documents of experience as well as place. A repetitive use of natural forms recalls formal patterns recalling folk art, printed textiles and surface design.