“In this exhibition I explore the Lake District in its many watery instances - its ghylls and rivers, torrential falls and hanging clouds, the bristle of a breeze on the surface of a tarn.” - Fay Collins
As its name suggests, the Lake District is a land of water - but not just lakes. Wild waterfalls, bubbling becks, rain, mist, snow, flood and drought have been brought together in this exhibition by Fay Collins, an artist who, like all of us, is drawn to water. The human impulse to swim, play, gaze and contemplate in and near water, combined with that raw, powerful experience of being immersed in dramatic mountain environments, makes Cumbria a popular place to be; on top of that a long tradition of Romantic and aesthetic engagement with the area means it can be hard, from an artistic point of view, to find an original way in.
With this exhibition, Fay brings a unique, unsentimental body of work to the table. Often finding sharply contrasting, playful beauty and meaning in overlooked and haphazard arrangements of waters-edge debris, groups of trees, rock and confluences of rivers: she has produced a collection of paintings that delight, interrogate and surprise. They force us to consider the minute and the momentary as well as the vertiginous and majestic. Here we see water in the Lake District - its abundance and its absence - in terms of its relationship to plant and bird life, to sky and to geology. We see it, as Fay does, as both a celebration of a life force and testament to the fragility of our environment. Here we witness an ongoing dialogue with Romanticism in which pleasure and beauty are inherent in the terrifying force and grandeur of nature.
When Fay looks back at her days of wild-swimming, kayaking, mountaineering, she can recall the overriding sensation of being so close to danger or the unknown. And it is these fears and exhilarations that are re-animated in the paintings in ‘Drawn to Water.’
Fay offers a sober, alternative vision of the Lakes, sensitive to the value of water in all its manifestations and to the consequences of its absence; with an eye on climate change and the incursion of people / hand of humankind on this special place.
The vision she has explored through these paintings investigates that timeless, human fascination with water in natural settings and the impulse towards contemplation in its presence. At the same time, she is offering the viewer a unique, personal insight into the choices that she makes in perspective - looking upwards at a rushing torrent, submerged reeds at arm’s length, a shore glimpsed through trees at eye level, beyond the visible horizon - as well as in materials and technique - scratching and reworking of paint and wax enables her to express and reformulate her lived experiences of these places. She enjoys paying careful attention to colour, texture and light, thus many of my paintings celebrate the exquisite detail discovered in nature.
The relationship between water and geology, water and plant life, water and sky, is the starting-point of this body of work; Fay has attempted to articulate this in as ambivalent and unsentimental approach as possible. Her interpretation of these watery places; the fear of the cold depths when swimming, the fast-changing light as rain showers move across a valley, the thrill of kayaking, the simple delight of working in plein air, and reliving experiences back in the studio, all of these can be intuited.
