Review: Layers of Land - Stroud group exhibition

Upon entering the space, my attention is immediately drawn to Hajichristou’s sculptural piece—its form girded with coarse leather straps, its core embracing what appears to be a tree branch precariously mounted on high concrete heels. From these heavy blocks, a singular vertical steel armature rises, holding the branch aloft like a decaying wedding dress adorned with layers of lichen lace. Concrete and steel restrain it, suspending it in a state between dynamic fall and irreversible transformation. It hovers in tension, resisting collapse.

My gaze shifts from this sculptural gravity to the delicate wall-hung series of small-scale paintings on canvas in rich emerald and orange hues. One evokes the sky mirrored in a muddy puddle, ochre soil seeping through rusty cracks. Another captures light filtering through tender spring leaves, igniting barely distinguishable branches into a kaleidoscope of greens and blues. These fragments evoke the sensation of memory—vivid, fleeting, fertile. Nature here is not presented as setting but as atmosphere, as psychic residue. One can imagine the wedding dress having once belonged in this juicier, more alive landscape.

Lifting upward—almost like raising my head from earth to sky—I encounter Biard’s large-scale yellow painting. It acts as a solar field, a space of expansive stillness. The yellow halo wraps the viewer in the presence of absence, lifting toward a midday brightness bursting with warmth. Yet beneath this luminous field are embedded fragments of text—disconnected traces, ghostly truths, the shadows of remembered lives. It feels like a place where disembodied souls reunite with soulmates—a sky of forgetting, or of peaceful remembering.

The spirit moves like a veil through the trees, like cold air that seeps in and withdraws without sound. Roberts' canvases convey the felt presence of the wet forest. Her work juxtaposes horizontal, transparent white swells with dark vertical pillars, staging a visual dialogue between the material and the metaphysical. The fog condenses into ribbons; thread-like brushstrokes weave histories into the landscape. Warm green copse becomes melody—wafting up and down—subtly shifting something previously immovable. A swirl of visibility gives shape to the invisible transition.

Hajichristou’s miniature ceramic works ground me with their scale. They invite close looking—earth in its material substance, excavated like wet puddles cut into rectangular fragments. These ceramic tiles or plates carry a kind of geological memory. Their weight anchors them, yet their surfaces—imprinted with wildflower textures—speak of fragility, temporality, and the quiet intelligence of natural decay.

Together, the exhibition reflects itself—like echoing calls across the Stroud Valleys. Migrating between material thinking and pictorial memory, these works challenge the viewer’s perception and attunement within the intimate scale of the Stroud gallery. Layers of Land is not merely about landscape—it is about what land holds: memory, rupture, stillness, and the slow unfolding of time.

07.2025