Intuative
About
Mineral paintings by Ali Sweeting, made with tin from Cornish seams worked for four thousand years. A history older than written record.
With fifteen years of material investigation, the work sits in a distinct territory, between the geological abstraction of the St Ives tradition and contemporary practices that engage directly with natural materials. The paintings are not landscape paintings. They are paintings made from landscape, and are not fixed at the moment of making. A surface that holds one quality at dawn holds another by late afternoon.
Devonshire clay, earth pigments, mineral pigments, Somerset willow charcoal, and Cornish tin laid into the upper surfaces where it catches and returns light. Acrylic and mixed media add colour and depth. Layers are formed, allowed to rest, revisited. Texture, tone and mineral presence settle into each other. Each painting begins instinctively and deepens over weeks.
The surface knows before the hand does.
Ali's studio sits at the edge of the Somerset Levels, among four thousand apple trees, ancient bluebell woodland rising behind. In spring the orchard turns, a wash of pink. The woodland deepens through summer and autumn, where deer pass unheard between the trees and tawny owls call at dusk. A place held quietly apart, where the practice deepens with the years.
The Fal Estuary in Cornwall is the second place of Ali's practice, returned to for over forty years. Its oak woodland, its low water at quiet hours, the call of the curlew across the flats. The materials of Tidal Alchemy come from this coastline.
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What is noticed first is not
what time will reveal
Time passes between each
layer
Nature
A Compass
Ali's artistic journey began in 2011, after a life changing event that left an unexpected and all consuming desire to paint. Alongside it came an instinct to work with the materials of the natural world.
The desire arrived without warning, with the force of something that could not be set aside.
Ali grew up on a Devonshire farm, where river clay was the first material she experimented with. She still works with it today. Her approach to sourcing is local wherever possible and considered in every instance. The practice is grounded in her BSc (Hons) Environment Management degree from Cranfield University, which informs the sourcing approach. The commitment to local material is not a constraint on the practice but inseparable from it.
Singular works
A painting alive to the light of the room, holding more in the surface than the eye sees at first, deepening with each year it is lived with.
Fifteen years in, the practice deepens. Works held privately in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States and southern Africa.
Each release is offered first to the studio list.
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