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Ali Sweeting’s paintings explore the relationship between geological time and the fleeting rhythms of tide and light, to consider humanity’s place within the natural world and the processes that continue to shape the land.

Tin, pigments and minerals, hand collected from the Cornish coast, carry the physical character of the shoreline into the painted surface. Material becomes both medium and evidence: the landscape is present not as an image, but through the matter itself. The work sits between the landscape abstraction of the St Ives tradition and contemporary practice with natural materials.

Tidal Alchemy is drawn from the Fal Estuary, where Sweeting has returned for more than forty years. The interplay of mineral and shifting light gives the paintings a changing presence, responsive to the conditions in which they are seen. The surfaces develop in layers, each painting allowed to rest before being revisited over weeks. Accumulation and alteration shape the final work, echoing the gradual way in which sediment settles. Moving between image and object, the works hold the enduring and the transient in tension.

Sweeting’s work invites a renewed connection with the natural world and a longer view than the immediacy of human experience allows. Set against the tide’s twice daily movement and the span of a single life, the paintings offer a measure of time beyond our own, and a way back into it.