Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery: What the Land Remembers

This exhibition runs until the 30yh August 2026

I really enjoyed the art shown in this exhibition which was all inspired by Cornwall's landscape.  It featured work by ten different female contemporary artists, each of which portrayed Cornwall quite differently.

Cornwall has a gloriously varied landscape which with the added influence of the weather and ocean, is constantly changing.  We all know that Cornwall's weather changes at the drop of a hat and with that, the light changes completely.  I don't know how many times we have sat and looked across at St Michael's Mount for instance and every time it is different, constantly changing.

An exhibition like this really makes it clear that even with the same muse (Cornwall), we do not all see the same and we don't all focus on the same things.  It goes beyond the types of materials artists use, but of course this has a huge impact too.  There were three sculptors included in the exhibition and of course, their works were very different to those on canvases, their focus different.

Tamsyn Trevorrow is a ceramicist who produces work inspired by the meeting of land and sea and I could see both the textures of weathered granite and the frothy lightness at the edge of the sea in her work.  I really would love to have run my fingers over the pieces...  I loved Bosigran Cliffs where two finger like boulders reached up, drawn together but not actually touching.  Another theme in her work is spirals and one of these pieces was also on display and I found this form really interesting.  They were like a breaking wave in a sphere with a hole through the middle.

Charlotte Jones ceramics included more bowls.  Her surfaces were cleaner, smoother, than Tamsyn's, their styles, and techniques, completely different.  Charlotte uses Cornish white stoneware clay but also includes small amounts of natural deposits that she finds from the landscape, such as rust and oxides.  Her bowls featured stripes of different materials and colours.  They were layered rocks, water, sand and you could clearly see the influence of the landscape in her works, although it was a subtler approach.

Megan Gant's ceramics were not so subtle!  They drew inspiration from a grittier side of Cornwall, the mining landscape and graffiti.  They were bold, graphic and a little bit punk.  I want one very much.  Her ceramic forms are a canvas for her layered images built of different glazes, transfers and techniques such as sgraffito.  Images of derelict mine buildings layered with graffiti and colour, show a Cornwall that is just as familiar to me as the more touristy seascapes.  One that I also love and appreciate.

While the ceramist's work adorned display cases and plinths, the remaining artists adorned the walls and there was just as much variety here. Size, viewpoint, colours, styles...  they all varied.

Nina Brook captured a viewpoint I have never seen used before in this way and found really interesting.  She painted a birds eye view, looking down.  I loved her canvases depicting the sea with tiny surfers on their boards but my favourite was her glorious Camel Estuary at Low Tide.  In this picture, a small boat is left high and dry, surrounded by pools of blue and green water.  Dimples could have been rocks or people seen very differently.  

Amy Albright creates dreamy landscapes exploring the shifting boundaries between, land, sea and air.  I found it very surprising that these images were created using oil paints in translucent layers.  I expected them to have been created using watercolours as some layers reminded me of the way colour will move with water.  

Sarah Woods pieces were bold graphic depictions of where sea and land meets using a simplified pallet of white, greys and light blue.  The pallet made them feel fresh and airy but also took away and indication of weather from her landscapes.  They are clearly studies in the forms, how the land and sea are shaped together.  Deceptively simple and what looks like an accidental expressive brush stroke, is actually a carefully placed cove with a highlight of sand or a shift in the type of vegetation.

Natalie Day makes semi abstract paintings of landscapes using experimental cyanotype techniques, pigments collected from the land and copper leaf.  I love her ethos of using pigments from the land and I am quite curious about her techniques for collecting and transforming the things she finds in to useable pigments.  

Aisleigh Anne's were much more intuitive, capturing not just a landscape but something of how she felt in connecting to that landscape.  It's easy to believe that she paints mostly en plein air, because there is an immediacy to her work, that implies a moment, or two, of feeling rather than a long period of contemplation.  Of course, I have no idea how long the work actually takes her but there is something very attractive about this feeling of being inside how she felt in that moment looking at the land.

Sophie Carter also produces paintings that suggest emotion, but its somehow bigger...  I think the emotion is less inspired by the land and more by the sky.  Her clouds are stunning and her landscapes sit beneath in brooding layers.  I want to dwell less amongst her trees and more in her skies and journey to her far horizons.

Ruth Bateman's paintings were the most exuberant and colourful.  Her paintings while rooted in real landscapes, are also formed from her imagination.  They are abstract and figurative.  She uses materials you would expect combined with ones you would not.  She seems to sit in some middle ground pulling from opposing ideas and techniques and combining them in a joyful riot.

I would happily go and see this exhibition again and then take the art home with me.