ALCHEMICAL LANDSCAPES
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Diamond in the Landscape
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Water Meeting Yellow Stone
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Water Almost Touching Pink Stone
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Fiery Water
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Union of Elements
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Alchemical Birth
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ALCHEMICAL LANDSCAPES
Series of 6 Painted Collages, 2022 Exhibited in The Order of the Sun and Moon, St Ives 2023
Exhibition Text
This 2022 series documents the moment in my work when geometric and organic forms first begin to inhabit the landscape of West Penwith.
Working with collage, I placed geometric elements: sharp triangular forms and a precise diamond, directly into painted landscapes, suggesting encounters between different orders of reality. These geometric interventions operate as portals, suggesting pathways between visible terrain and invisible realms that lie beyond ordinary perception.
The organic forms that populate these landscapes: soft, pod-like shapes in coral pinks, reds and yellows and with cellular configurations, arrive with a different material quality entirely. They maintain their otherworldly nature, never quite settling into the painted earth beneath them. They hover, nest, or cluster across the land with the quality of visitors learning to inhabit unfamiliar territory. Some appear as seeds waiting to germinate; others suggest cocoons or vessels containing unknown forms of life.
In the opening work, a complex geometric mandala (taken from my Fertile Darkness series of paintings) floats above the darkened landscape like a cosmic diagram, its precise patterns contrasting with the atmospheric terrain below where pale forms cluster in the shadows. This establishes the series' central dynamic: the meeting of mathematical consciousness with organic becoming, structured awareness encountering fluid mysteries.
As the series unfolds, the triangular openings become increasingly prominent: sharp portals that slice through sky and touch the earth, suggesting passages between dimensions. These geometric interventions never blend with the landscape but maintain their otherness. Through one triangular window, we glimpse what might be stellar configurations; through another, cellular mysteries hover in undefined space.
The collaged organic forms undergo their own transformation throughout the series. Some nestle into valleys with increasing intimacy, while others maintain their quality of suspension, neither fully of the earth nor entirely separate from it. Their soft, rounded contours suggest biological processes such as growth, gestation, metamorphosis, and their collaged materiality ensures they remain visitors to the painted terrain.
The palette moves through cycles of earth and atmosphere: deep greens and purples giving way to ethereal blues and pale roses, as if documenting seasonal or even geological time. The final works become increasingly dissolved, matter and light interpenetrating until geometric precision and organic flow begin to find common ground in shared luminosity.
Working through collage allows these encounters to maintain their experimental quality. The geometric elements retain their sharp otherness while the organic forms preserve their mysterious origins. Nothing quite belongs, yet everything seems to be seeking relationship.
'Alchemical Landscapes' establishes the foundational grammar for my constellation-based practice: landscape as container for transformation, geometric forms as consciousness structures, organic shapes as carriers of invisible life.
Through these intimate experiments the work makes a proposition: that landscape in my work operates as an active field where consciousness meets matter, where invisible potentials can take visible form, and where the earth itself participates in the ongoing work of bringing new realities into being.