Tread softly…
For the past twenty years Robert Macfarlane, the writer and campaigning environmentalist, has been exploring the intense and precarious relationship between landscape and the human heart. Macfarlane has a remarkable ability to reveal the ways in which we have engaged with, and utilised, our immediate environment above and below the earth. He encourages us to know, respect and care for our special places. In addition, of course, our widespread sense of wonder needs to be underpinned by a collective and urgent sense of responsibility.
Amelia Humber’s work is evidence of an artist with a relentless curiosity to experience and record fleeting moments of atmosphere and the unexpected abstract elements of nature. The sheer scale and physicality of this engagement presents a real challenge to the artist, with a constant need to modify and refine materials and technique in order to confront and record the gigantic elegiac landscape. Each location visit is meticulously planned with routes and vistas carefully researched. An immediate priority for the artist is ‘to walk and enjoy the landscape, let the moment sit with me before I use memory to replicate and/or interpret’. In most cases individual works are completed in the studio utilising notes, sketches and photographs produced on location.
Often, the richly textured surface of these paintings is the result of oil paint interacting with charcoal, graphite and pastel. Although somewhat unpredictable (and risky) this final piece of artistic alchemy sometimes occurs when the paint is wet, sometimes when dry. In addition to works on canvas and board there is an evident joy in exploring the ethereal surface qualities created by various types of paper.
Amelia’s wanderlust has taken her on numerous visits to Scotland, Cornwall and Norfolk. Although the picture titles make reference to particular sites the paintings journey beyond the naturalistic specifics of place. The artistic response is so much more than mere representation. Amelia acknowledges a subtle move towards abstraction and is relaxed about the viewer ‘seeing what they want to see’. In stripping an image down to the key essentials and carefully reflecting on when the painting is finished she reveals a deep interest in ‘how and why the simplest of images can often have the most impact’.
‘Bundalloch’, in Scotland, is a work that conveys an atmosphere of dank stillness and silence, suggesting an air of expectation. The fluidity of the technique matches the ever-changing light and clouds of a heavy day. Another work produced in Scotland, ‘Hourn’, is focused on a dramatic, threatening sky that fully occupies two thirds of the canvas. With minimal reference to other landscape elements the bold palette of dark colours invites a range of interpretations. The implied threat is compelling and haunting.
Whilst the works in this exhibition demonstrate an impressive and deep intensity of engagement they also tap into an increasingly universal concern for our fragile landscapes. Perhaps there is a distant echo of W B Yeats when he wrote ‘Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams’.
Amelia’s work continues to evolve, primarily in response to the critical debate she generates within herself. Although the paintings may be physically demanding to produce they are the result of a deep engagement with, and embrace of, the earth and sky in all their multifarious glory.
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