Briony Anderson

Through painting and printing processes, the work I make engages closely with landscape. Always influenced by the environment, particularly of the North, I also use other sources, such as historical landscape paintings and nature writing as a starting point. Abstract marks take on pictorial elements of landscapes and colours are often quiet, subtly suggesting distanced encounters with the land. I have recently been combining different materials to create small mixed media works on paper, often working over existing pieces in an ongoing process of recycling and repurposing.

My work often reworks existing landscape images into paintings and in borrowing images as sources, mainly historical paintings, the traditions of landscape painting are the subject, rather than the observed natural world. Each work emerges from a convergence between historical source material, the surrounding landscape, memory and imagination. I am interested in how Western visual traditions of landscape representation have influenced contemporary ideas and attitudes concerning landscape and environment: geographical information focusing on the physical character of the landscape ‘tells everything yet nothing.’