Snow Into Water and Cassandra Wall’s recent work is a celebration of the beauty of Nature and its liberating and calming effect on the mind. Lockdown enforced a slowdown in the pace of life with all its noise and complexities, and accorded us a unique opportunity to hear the voice of the natural world around us, and the transience that makes it so precious.

CW has been working with textiles since childhood. Her compositions in varying degrees of abstraction that capture the spirit of the landscape, are initiated sur le motif.  Particularly, she is drawn to the longshore drift where the tides pile up and wash away the shingle, re-sculpting the littoral shoreline. Dungeness: Summer and Winter contrasts Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, lit from within on Winter nights, with its wild Summer ‘garden without borders’. Heather Hills features crests and waves of purple heather with backdrafts of golden-green mosses. Her collaged landscapes in torn papers with hints of the patterns and tessellations to come, are precursors to her immaculately handstitched textiles. Transposing her ‘sketches’ to cloth involves sourcing vintage and hand-coloured fabrics some of which she tones with tea, matching her swatches against her chosen subjects.

Contemplating nature’s kaleidescope of beauty, there is ultimately an expression of meditative calm achieved through the repetitions of colour and shape, and the juxtapositions that inform that simplicity and strength.

Wall’s compositions, each created over months, present as contemporary textile ‘paintings’ floating in tray frames, unglazed. Her language is colourfield abstraction towards a state of meditation, delighting in the journey that nature presents dancing towards that end.  All is beautifully expressed as Snow Into Water where the white of falling snowflakes from the sky melts into the blue of waters below.

SNOW INTO WATER Curated by Jenny Blyth

Textile Paintings by Cassandra WALL and paintings by Chloe FREMANTLE

for The North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford OX2 7JN

29 September - 10 October 2020