Katharine Le Hardy’s latest body of work examines the ways in which landscapes can communicate a narrative and induce feelings of nostalgia and escapism in the viewer. Here, dramatic scenery is depicted with a tenderness and tranquillity that transports us to a calm and thoughtful space; one in which memories and dreams combine, nestled in the forest’s canopy and shimmering beneath the water’s surface.

Using personal photos, memories and found imagery as sources of inspiration, the artist has created a world that is part-imagined and part-remembered, born from reality and yet fantastical in appearance.

Katharine paints intuitively, working on multiple paintings at a time and without a preconceived idea of her final composition. Using thinned oils, she uses an array of tools from paintbrush to scraper to make suggestive and gestural marks. These instinctive applications provide the impetus for subsequent layers, with many of the canvases living through several iterations, rotated and reworked as the artist draws out the scenery hidden in the marks already made.