We are looking forward to welcoming Katharine Le Hardy back to the gallery for her debut solo exhibition in May.
After first showcasing her work with us last year in our inaugural open call, she now returns with an exciting new body of work for her solo presentation.
Katharine Le Hardy has long been admired for her landscape painting. The culmination of several years of thinking and experimentation, 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, landscapes are depicted with a tenderness and tranquility that transport us to a calm and thoughtful space; one in which memories and dreams combine, nestled in the forest 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. Le Hardy paints intuitively, working on multiple paintings at once 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, the unpredictability of the mark making reflection the energy of the organic chaos, resisting order and structure. 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.
In this series, the artist’s distinctive, impressionistic style - distilled forms, sweeping brushstrokes and drips of paint - is amplified by the visual history we see embedded, the imprint of earlier layers remaining exposed beneath the surface. Combined with a thoughtfully limited colour palette, earthy tones punctuated by pops of colour, be it a fern catching the light, new growth or a wildflower. There is a depth and honesty that contributes to the sense of narrative within these landscapes. In this, Le Hardy captures something of the essence of being rooted in nature, immersed beneath the trees, yet still free to explore the untapped depths of imagination.
