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The hill, of Freya Wood’s exhibition title, refers geographically to a kind of shared Wiltshire territory of both the south edge of the Marlborough downs and the north escarpment of the Vale of Pewsey. The poet Edward Thomas (1878 - 1917) celebrated these downs. ‘There is something oceanic in their magnitude, their ease, their solitude - above all in their liquid forms, that combine apparent mobility with placidity, and in the vast playground which they provide for the shadows of the clouds.  They are never abrupt, but, flowing on and on make a type of infinity.’

 

So far so picturesque. But Freya Wood does not flinch from the working agricultural landscape and seems to delight in using the tramlines of chemical spraying to give pattern and a sense of confinement to the vast prairies. Expect to see pylons, barbed wire and other features and a return to her favourite leitmotif - the country stile.  

 

Close inspection reveals that these new paintings seem to be ‘dissolving’ into a blizzard of tiny flecks.  Released from mere topography, this exhibition of works on paper brings her figurative art closer to abstraction than before.

 

The downs, as the late Terry Pratchett observed, being composed of chalk formed from the skeletal remains of millions of years old microscopic marine organisms, provoke a natural state of mysticism.  The painting ‘Watcher on the Hill’ seems to encapsulate the apocalyptic atmosphere of this turbulent moment in time which is yet tinged with the promise  of, cyclically- due, redemption and even revelation.