Briony Anderson lives and works in rural Dumfriesshire in South West Scotland. Through painting and printing processes, her work engages closely with northern landscape. Working mostly on paper, the landscape is suggested rather than described and often focuses on the meeting of land, sea and sky – untraceable edges. Abstract marks take on pictorial elements of landscapes and colours are often quiet, subtly suggesting distanced encounters with the land. Each work emerges from a convergence between the surrounding landscape, memory, imagination and other sources, such as historical landscape paintings and nature writing. Briony often uses the postcard format in her work to reflect the continuing ritual of sending an A6 sized object in order to share, commemorate and celebrate a particular landscape or location.
A number of works rework existing landscape images into paintings and in borrowing images as sources, mainly historical paintings, the traditions of landscape painting become the subject, rather than the observed natural world. Underlying the work is an ongoing interest in how Western visual traditions of landscape representation have influenced contemporary ideas and attitudes concerning landscape and environment: geographical information focusing on the physical character of the landscape 'tells everything yet nothing.' *
***
Briony Anderson was born in Aberdeen and studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art and Art History at The University of Edinburgh. Exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Royal Society of Edinburgh/Edinburgh Art Festival, EB&Flow Gallery, London, Fleming Collection, London, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Berloni Gallery, London, The University of Aberdeen and Acme Project Space, London. Residencies include: Cove Park, Argyll and Bute; Cill Rialaig Arts Centre, Co. Kerry; Dublin Fire Station; Acme Studio's five-year Work/Live Fire Station Residency, London; and Berloni Gallery, London. Works are in a number of private and public collections including the Government Art Collection, The University of Edinburgh, John Jones Contemporary Collection, Art in Healthcare and The University of Aberdeen.
︎cv
***
K. Olwig, Nature's Ideological Landscape (Alen&Unwin, London, 1984), p.xviii
Briony Anderson
email brionyanderson@gmail.com
instagram @briony.anderson
