Zoe Ashbrook + Kathy Miller

A pop up exhibition

8th - 22nd February 2025

Zoe Ashbrook

Zoe’s multi-disciplinary practice is anchored in observations of time, landscape, nature and memory.

“As I become increasingly absorbed in the landscape around me, I’ll pause to capture and document transient interactions between light and shade, textures, lines and marks. Through the slowness of mindful drawing combined with quick expressions of intuitive mark making, I respond to sensory explorations of the passage of time observed within landscape and nature, deepening my felt experience and sense of connection to place.

Observations are reinforced through photography, video and audio recordings. Episodes of experience that catalyse an increased sensory awareness and conscious shift in my emotional and physical state of being.”

In the studio, Zoe’s intuitive approach provides a meditative space to reflect upon her observations. Concepts of entwined histories of time embedded within the landscape are combined with memories of ‘noticing’ the phenomena of sensory details and textures of place.

Paintings evolve with a visual language evocative of the passage of time. Through repetition and layering, where addition and subtraction play an equally significant role in the search for balance between abstraction and the representational, and the notions of time, memory and

landscape explored are both conceptual and tangible. Zoe’s process rewards the viewer with a rich tapestry of deeply layered, often luminous spaces, obscuring and highlighting a nuance of mark making and subtle, graduating shifts of colour.

While some paintings appear perhaps as depictions of ‘somewhere’, others offer a glimpse into a more personal moment of observation. Aspiring to evoke within the viewer a reason to pause, Zoe invites us to spend time with the work, allowing a slow reveal and quiet recognition of the expressions of time and memory embedded within the work and our everyday experiences of the landscapes we engage with.

Kathy Miller 

Water and ink, ink and water – interchangeable and elemental to Kathy Miller's work. From the precision of typography and design to free artistic expression, her practice explores and communicates the substance of the immaterial, experience, and transformation.

Thirty years of specialising in brand identity and packaging guide her hand, while significant and profound life experiences provide a deep inner compass. A much-awarded creative director, Miller is known for instinctive contextual thinking and imaginative discovery at the heart of her practice.

Miller's mixed media practice is heavily based on using handmade botanical inks. She creates intimate visual poems of storytelling held within layers of colour and water. Sometimes dramatic, they reflect stillness, solitude, and silence – these are worlds where you can 'receive' time.

Miller reinterprets classical sculptures in her Primal Origins series, uncovering their geological essence. Using botanical inks and natural pigments, she exposes fragmented surfaces that evoke time, erosion, and transformation. These works connect beauty with raw, primordial forces, exploring the intersections of the creation of art and the aesthetics of beauty in art. For Miller, they reflect the interplay between identity, loss, grief, and rebirth.

Miller constantly explores what lies unseen in the liminal spaces of time between real and imagined, dreams and memories. Her work is continually evolving, using interdisciplinary materials and expressive techniques.

Born in South Wales, Kathy is now based in the countryside of England and Italy.

Artwork from this exhibition can be viewed and purchased here.