Hannah Luxton London, UK, b. 1986

Hannah Luxton makes paintings inspired by the geological sublime and the late 18th Century Romantic notion that a divine order resides within raw nature. Her works reach further back in time still, finding an emotional kinship with the implicit sense of the sublime traceable within prehistoric art, and are further enhanced by animistic currents, which hint towards a higher spiritual dimension.

Luxton finds her subjects within nature - the sun, the moon, stars, mountain tops, craters and ice caverns - condensing and abstracting each referent into an archetypal version of itself. Her paintings slow time and elude direct interpretation. Their strong emotive core is yet fragile and fleeting and they speak an elementary, instinctual language rooted in a place of pre-rational understanding.

 Luxton has an instinctive empathy for Eastern philosophies of the Void that embrace this space as freedom beyond the confines of the material world, and seek it out as the purest mental state of existence. Luxton uses bare linen to give substance and significance to supreme ‘nothingness’, dissolving the boundary frequently drawn between ‘the natural world’ that surrounds us on Earth and the ‘natural’ sphere of the cosmos.