In 2024 Arlene Sharp's work was included in 'Curious Space: Transitions in Landscape', a group show at Willesden Gallery, London.
Playing with concepts of 'space' and 'place', Open College of the Arts 2023 graduate and New Blood Emerging Art Prize nominee Arlene Sharp's canvases explore familiarity and abstraction through bold use of colour and natural forms. Intrigued by our relationship with nature and natural landscapes, Arlene's work reflects an experience of space that goes beyond the plane of physical reality to encompass experience, memory and perception. By translating thoughts and experiences into visual form, these semi-abstract works ask how the process of painting can help us to truly notice a space, and inhabit it in a more meaningful way.
Working in charcoal, chalk, inks and acrylic, Arlene's practice includes memory paint sketches and site-specific projects which involve burying canvases in a landscape for periods of time, as well as displaying paintings in woodlands to create collaborative works which engage the landscape as medium and participant. Layering colours, textures and perspectives, these pieces call to mind the sensory blur of recollection, images reflected in bodies of water and light falling through foliage to create a feeling of situateness and place. Grounded in, as Arlene writes, 'the truth as I see it', Arlene's work encourages us to consider what the 'truth' of a place is, and how our own experiences and perceptions contribute to its formation.
Emma Drye, Programme Leader for Painting (Open College of the Arts - Open University):
'Arlene's painting and site specific installation formed an impressive submission, beautifully contextualised with deeply informed research into the significant contexts within which she is operating. She shows a truly innovative approach to the painted object, pictorial space and the siting of paintings. All these things have been done with ambitious and tireless creativity and application. Her relationship with a small copse of trees and pond that formed the basis of her field research enabled her to build on her formal innovations to create an evocative and inspiring final degree show.'
Artist statement
I am a contemporary painter based in London. My paintings are inspired by the natural world, particularly by the shape and colour of landscape and nature. Through walking, sketching, and photography, I find ways to capture the essence of a place and convey my experience of being in it. From my local woodland, a constant source of inspiration for many years, alongside more unfamiliar places, I explore ways to represent the everchanging landscape and my experience and memory of place.
I use acrylic paint, inks, painted collage, and drawing media such as charcoal and oil pastel. The paintings gradually evolve through layering; areas are often masked and re-instated, yet traces of the underlying layers always remain, recording the history of the painting. Shifts in space, form, colour and light move the paintings towards abstraction, but they are always grounded in the truth as I see it.
