Image Credits -Paula Payne

My current body of work, Shadowlands, continues my interest in landscape, but through the lens of how the impact of the Anthropocene affects the ways we relate to land - or to Country - or to place.

These works also confirm my interest in the processes and material of painting. Christine Morrow describes the work as follows:

"Payne manifests environmental anxieties by employing elisions, doubts, and uncertainties in her painting technique. Her glazes are hazes and her scumbles are stumbles. There is deliberate ambivalence in the iconography too. Contour lines could be escarpments, ridges of open-cut mines, watercourses, or terrace farming."

I draw from personal experiences: from places I've walked across; from tracts of land into which I've been a visitor; from sites I've dreamed of. These works started in my childhood, when I took long sea journeys with my mother to lands, I'd only imagined, and they've continued to develop as memory-maps that also trace the parameters of global environmental anxiety.

Yet they also offer refuge - images that can soothe as much as they can raise concerns.

Images 1 to 4 In situ ‘Shadowlands’ Brunswick Street Gallery September 2022