"My works looks at the merging of fictional and real space, how stories and our memories can affect and alter our view of a place. Picture plains tilt upwards and vivid colours grow across the surface consuming it, leaving the landscapes uncertain of whether they are forming or falling apart. Paint distorts space as it aims to describe something more than the real, the body remembers, that muscle memory can be caught and frozen in gesture, sometimes only fleetingly before it dissolves in amongst the turpentine as a remnant of time.
In my pictures this state of flux is shown through composition and paint by playing with how the viewer can look at the work. Some works block your view with shapes, grids and colours leaving only small pockets of space to breath, others sit uncomfortably calm as if waiting for the viewer to arrive. This feeling of never truly having access to the landscape is meant to reflect something that is felt in moments of the sublime in nature.
The fire series stems from my time spent in Chernobyl in Ukraine last year and specifically the time I spent in the red forest. The red forest is the most radioactive area in the Zone and was physically burnt red by the contamination. In the work the fire like the radiation consumes and flattens the space making it hard for the viewer to access it, this was similar to my own experience of being in the red forest."
- Lucy Smallbone, 2018
Lucy Smallbone is a graduate from the Slade School of Fine Art Master's program who specialises in modern landscape painting. Her work looks at the merging of fictional and real space and questions the part that memory and the mind can play in altering a view of a place.