Zoe Benbow discusses her exhibition at Dartington

With the arrival of her arboreally-inspired paintings in our gallery space, we catch up with artist Zoe Benbow to find out more about her creative process, the influences and training that helped shape her work, and the ways in which place and the natural world continue to inspire her.

Zoe has returned to Dartington to present a solo exhibition of her paintings, taking the subject of ‘trees’ as a starting point. The work will be on display in our gallery space on the Dartington estate until 20 November. 

Our Marketing Lead for Learning, Will Kemp, met up with Zoe in the gallery once the work was installed to find out more about her work. Listen via the link below. 

More about the exhibition

In recent times, when Covid restrictions have meant we have all had to stay closer to home, for city dwellers like Zoe the tree became a symbol of an accessible wilderness on our doorstep.

Often the paintings reference landscapes as remembered in fleeting moments, or recorded in photographs and drawings. By exploring the same motifs and images over a long period of time and through the medium of paint, the canvases do not aim to be a representation of a specific time and place, but rather to imply the sense of a landscape, to evoke a landscape of the mind’s eye.

In this way, Zoe alludes to the modernist tradition of abstraction, where the painting exists between itself and its audience – forever in the present – creating a liminal space where we, the onlooker, become ‘the figure in the landscape’ and – like Mary Poppins jumping through the chalk drawing – hopefully we are visually able to enter the painting with a little reverie and magic.

Zoe Benbow is a studio based independent artist with many years’ professional experience and lives in Hackney with her teenage son.

zoebenbow.co.uk
Facebook: Studio Zoe Benbow
Instagram: @zoebenbow

Find out more our gallery programme via the button below.