Louise Cattrell has undertaken residencies in Bulgaria, America, Switzerland and the Australian desert, with awards ranging from the John Minton RCA Award to a British Council Fellowship in Sri Lanka. Currently living and working in London, rather than her native Scotland, Louise is well travelled. The direct experience of being physically in the landscape and combining both memory and experience is crucial to what she calls the ‘360 degree’ immersive experience.
This new exhibition launches Louise’s subtly contemporary, yet timeless landscapes of the Borderlands, including Ailsa, Holy Isle and Bass Rock. Laura Cummings, Chief Art Critic for the Observer and winner of the James Tait Memorial Award for ‘The Vanishing Man’, her biography on Valasquez, openly compares the work to Turner. She calls Louise ‘a romantic for the twenty-first century’. She explains ‘What makes these works so different from the romanticism of the past is the embodied sense of passing through the landscape, of passing through time, of moving towards something in the distance that seems always slightly out of reach’. Highly evocative of the light and magnitude of this extraordinary part of the world, ‘these paintings express the way we experience such places, as much as what we actually see’.
By CCAI on 25/09/2017