Consider the trees of the lake. What lichens grow in that flurried encampment of burnt umber and electric blue, with those branches skirting up from the water to the sky? What forms of cloud formations are these: cumulus or alto? How to make sense of that cauldron of fire, burning deep and dark, and which the naturalist might call the sandbank, irradiating in the foreground? In Ella Wright’s Uprooted, we find nature lost in a state of revelation. Yes, these are the trees of the lake, but this is a vision of an arcadian world reimagined in pendulous colour; reworked, transformed, transmuted. It is no longer the trees of the lake. ‘To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances’, as John Berger once said: ‘a drawing of a tree shows not a tree, but a tree being looked at.’ As we enter Wright’s haven of forms, these are paintings of trees being looked at, and revelling in the unique exaltation of sharing in that looking with a stranger.
@ellacwright Unsteady Ground, now on show
@cedricbardawil