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Landscape has never required literal representation to feel true. Some of the most affecting work in this genre operates at a distance from depiction, translating the experience of place into colour, gesture, and form rather than rendering what the eye sees.
A current group exhibition at Graystone Gallery in Edinburgh brings together four artists whose practices demonstrate this principle. New Visions presents painting and print by Balbinder Broadbent, Hetty Haxworth, Amanda Phillips, and Victoria Wylie. Each works abstractly. Each draws on landscape as source material. And each arrives at markedly different results.
Grounded in Lived Experience
What connects these four artists is not style but orientation. All approach abstraction through lived experience rather than pure formalism. Their practices draw on landscape, memory, sensation, and perception, producing works that feel both provisional and alive.
Victoria Wylie’s paintings exemplify this. Works like Returning to Light use layered blues and greens to evoke Scottish coastal atmospheres. The horizon line appears and disappears. Forms suggest land meeting water without insisting on it. These paintings function as records of looking, not at a place but from within it.
Balbinder Broadbent takes a different approach. Her richly layered surfaces in works such as Blue Gold build colour upon colour, revealing and concealing shapes through accumulation. Pinks press against turquoise. Warm ochres emerge beneath gestural marks. The effect is dynamic, almost musical, with colour working as rhythm rather than description.
Between Structure and Intuition
The tension between control and spontaneity runs through much abstract landscape work. Too much planning and the painting feels inert. Too little and coherence dissolves. The works in New Visions hover between structure and intuition, between revelation and concealment.
Hetty Haxworth’s prints and paintings occupy interesting territory here. Works like Velvet Night use bold geometric forms and clean planes of colour that might suggest cool precision. But her process involves monoprint and screenprint techniques that introduce variation and the unexpected. The geometry feels inhabited rather than sterile.
Amanda Phillips brings an architect’s spatial awareness to her painting. Having practised as a chartered architect before returning to fine art, she composes with an understanding of how forms occupy and divide space. Works like Staithes balance atmospheric washes with structured horizontal bands, creating surfaces that read simultaneously as landscape and as abstract arrangement.
Thresholds Physical and Psychological
The exhibition takes transition as its theme. Shaped by the pause between seasons, states of mind, and ways of seeing, New Visions inhabits that fertile in-between space where endings loosen and new possibilities begin to surface. As winter gives way to spring, the works reflect on moments of emergence.
This suits abstraction’s particular strengths. Where representational painting captures fixed moments, abstract work can hold contradiction and change within a single surface. Across the exhibition, colour, rhythm, mark-making, and layered surfaces suggest thresholds both physical and psychological.
Rather than offering fixed conclusions, New Visions presents art as an open, evolving process. The works encourage reflection, attentiveness, and a willingness to embrace uncertainty, finding beauty in flux.
Seeing the Work
New Visions runs from 30th January to 21st February 2025 at Graystone Gallery, 52 Hamilton Place, Edinburgh. The gallery focuses on contemporary Scottish art and represents both established and emerging artists working across painting, sculpture, and ceramics.
For those interested in how abstraction can carry landscape’s emotional weight without its literal forms, the exhibition offers four distinct approaches in productive conversation.
