- Dates:
- Wednesdays to Fridays 13:00-17:00, Saturdays 11:00-16:00
- Sundays 11:00-17:00, Mondays & Tuesdays Closed
- Private View: Friday 09 June 2023 18:00-20:30
Verdance
(Detail) Meadow Deep:
watercolour and acrylic on paper mounted on aluminium 76x61cm.
© Maggie Jennings 2020. All rights reserved.
“Life’s beauty and transience are integral each to the other. To look at a living organism is to be witness to constant change. Life pulses and insists, forcing the new shoot with astonishing strength, silently exploding into bloom, burgeoning fruit being determined to survive and continue the cycle”. (Maggie Jennings, 2023)
These vibrant drawings and paintings from nature are active celebrations of the energy and urgency of life, and life’s transformation, dissipation, disintegration and decay.
Dancing Fungi: water-based media on paper 12x20cm. © Maggie Jennings 2022. All rights reserved.
The pictures develop themes from Jennings’ successful show at Highgate Gallery 5 years ago. They remain concerned with the joy and vitality of nature, but in this exhibition Jennings’ gaze is more intense and intimate, focusing closely on the dense variety of plants, fungi, birds and insects that she finds in her wild and rampant garden near Highgate where she has set up a new studio. She also draws inspiration from being a year-round swimmer at the Hampstead Heath Ladies Pond, where she observes wildlife around the water’s edge and in the meadows.
Pond Verging: watercolour and acrylic on paper, mounted on aluminium 70x112cm. © Maggie Jennings 2022. All rights reserved.
As a frequent traveller, the shock of Covid lockdown caused Jennings to experience both claustrophobia, and a liberating freedom from established routine. Time was spent sketching, gardening and growing vegetables and fruit to join her garden’s wild proliferation. The mass and tangle of plant growth she studied up-close gave rise to a wealth of visual information which felt almost overwhelming, and resulted in some paintings becoming dense, and worked like tapestry.
Maggie Jennings teaches Fine Art and specifically Printmaking. She currently teaches etching at The Royal Drawing School, and Printmaking at the Heatherley School of Fine Art. She was commissioned to write ‘Fine Art Screenprinting’ and has also produced a collaborative poetry book, ‘Studio Sink Poetry’.
For further information contact: Maggie Jennings
The Exhibition co-ordinator: Jane Berkin