Robyn Litchfield - Let Time Be Still

ROBYN LITCHFIELD LET TIME BE STILL

Robyn Litchfield was born in New Zealand and lives in North London. She graduated from the City and Guilds of London Art School with an MA in Fine Art (distinction) in 2017 and from London Metropolitan University with a BA Fine Art in 2012.

AWARDS AND NOTABLE RECENT EXHIBITIONS

2022 - Beep Painting Prize, Elysium Gallery, Swansea (shortlisted)

The Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London

2021 - The Contemporary British Painting Prize (longlisted)

2020 - The John Moores Painting Prize (longlisted)

The Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London

Jackson’s Painting Prize 2020, awarded the Landscape/Cityscape/Seascape category prize

2019 - Collyer Bristow Exceptional Award

The Bow Open Show . Signature Art Prize exhibition (finalist)

Contemporary British Painting Prize (longlisted)

ROBYN LITCHFIELD

Robyn Litchfield’s paintings are representations of sublime encounters with pristine and untouched landscapes. Drawing from archival material and personal documents relating to the early exploration and colonisation of New Zealand, Litchfield aims to reimagine and examine the experience of forays into a hitherto unknown space. She is interested in the idea of wilderness and the unknown as a terrain of the mind and as a place that induces reflexivity. Landscape becomes a ubiquitous template for exploring personal history, notions of cultural identity, alienation and a sense of belonging.

This new body of work focuses on the lowland forests and wetlands of New Zealand with their complex ecosystem and ancient trees. Lowland Forest once extended to almost all of New Zealand’s shoreline and less than fifteen percent remains. The fertile swampland was drained to form productive farmland in the name of civilisation leaving a fragmented forest at threat from weed invasion, pollutants and stock access.

During her recent visit the country was severely affected by flooding and landslides after a massive storm and a cyclone. Would this lost barrier of swamp forest have given some protection from these dangers? Wetlands reduce the impact of flooding, help to maintain water quality, support endangered species and can lock up carbon.

For Let Time Be Still Litchfield presents large scale paintings and smaller portal-like works which draw from her own photographs and recent experience. In these works Litchfield unveils centuries old trees amongst the verdancy and decomposition of these vestiges of primeval landscapes.

In the dense bush, all leaves and bark exude

The odour of mortality; for plants

Accept their death like stones

Rooted forever in time’s torrent bed.

Right: Do Nothing But Listen 2023, oil on linen, 160 x 120 cm

Excerpt from Haast Pass by James K Baxter

LET TIME BE STILL

A child knows that forests are frightening because fairy tales have warned them of wolves and witches, gingerbread houses and bears; highlighting the dangers of straying from the path and getting lost. Adults may no longer believe in fairytales, but forests are still places of uncertainty and possible dread where the unknown dwells deep in the undergrowth, among the brambles and fallen branches where the sun rarely shines. In these dark recesses we can feel dwarfed by a world without horizon or sky, unnerved by the immensity of a place that from the outside can look so small.

Robyn Litchfield takes us into some of the remaining original forests of her native New Zealand, where we quickly become lost in landscapes heavy with primeval time and memory. Instead of grand views and monumental scenes, her paintings linger among the trees, plants and waterways of these unique ecosystems. We travel with her on a journey deep into unfamiliar otherness, along waterways and tracks once used by the original settlers. We stumble across unexpected views, peering through a curtain of trailing fronds. We glide along silent creeks, gazing over stretches of water rippled with the entwined reflections of sky and foliage. We wonder at scenes of natural, untouched beauty, where sinewy tree trunks thrust leafy clouds into a cloudless sky. But the more we look, the more we become disorientated. Differences disappear and these forest scenes all begin to look the same, merging into a chaotic, peripheral confusion that disrupts the focused desire of our gaze.

Left: Spectral Lure 2023, oil in linen, 120 x 95 cm

As the great granddaughter of the New Zealand photographer Ernest Edward Bradbury, Litchfield is fascinated by the ability of photographs and paintings to frame and shape our encounter with the world. In previous bodies of work she would look for the punctum, the intriguing point of interest that stands out from the background and holds our attention. Yet these forests absorb the gaze, swallowing it in darkly dappled shadows. Instead of offering a single distinct subject to focus on, they confront us with a vast, organic, indecipherable object to marvel at. Back in her studio, however, Litchfield takes these scenes of rich biodiverse chaos and attempts to impose order on them, using stencils to frame and concentrate our view. These defined shapes, with their hard, focused edges push back the vast, confusing blur of insubstantial forms and scumbled colour to reveal areas of solid space, constellations of beauty we can hold onto amid the inconceivable vastness of the whole.

But Litchfield’s latest paintings are not concerned with the distinct forms of beauty. Instead of distant picturesque views, she obscures the horizon, hides the sky and collapses space. We become claustrophobic in works that deny our gaze the freedom to roam. Amongst the trees, surrounded by thick vegetation, engulfed in the dense, dimly lit recesses of arboreal time, the macro is reduced to the micro and instead of relying on sight we look through touch.

We see the trunk of a tree but not the full extent of its lush canopy; the parts but not the whole - bark, branches and leaves filling our vision with a peripheral dappled blur. As we look more closely and our horizons become limited, the world expands, distinct forms dissolve and what might have seemed beautiful from a distance, framed by a stencil, becomes an encounter with the formless, intangible expanses of the mysterious sublime, where, with nothing specific to focus on, our vision blurs and we become lost in a world of abstract confusion.

In the depths of the forest, the dim light affects the colours we see, reducing them to tiny shifts in tone just like the intense monochrome hues we see at dawn and dusk before the sun brings an explosion of technicolour vibrancy to the world.

Litchfield’s monochrome palette echoes these liminal crepuscular spaces, as the gentle vibration between their tones demands our close attention, and the calligraphic strokes she uses to push through the surface pigment, shiver with the subtle light released from the glowing ground beneath.

Fragments of Longing 2023, oil on linen, 65 x 80 cm

Reducing the natural vibrancy of these teeming worlds to blue or violet, green or maroon gives these paintings an unnatural aura, a strangeness that echoes the ancient otherness of the virgin forests as they resolutely defy the cultivated order of the modern world.

Beauty requires a form for us to see it, existing in the 2 degrees, or one percent, of our human vision that is clear and focused, where boundaries are fixed and distinct forms are found. The sublime, however, exists in our peripheral vision, the space of wide-eyed wonder and uncertainty beyond the edges of the known. In this intangible realm where nothing is truly solid we become engulfed in an atomic ocean of swirling, unfocused sensations and forms as intangible yet real as a cloud in the sky.

Left: Precious Grove 2023, oil on linen, 40.5 x 30.5 x 2 cm

Left: Beckoning 2023, oil on linen, 71 x 81 x 2 cm

In the fifteenth century, European Renaissance artists discovered how to represent the solid world through vanishing point perspective, but clouds defied their newly found ability to control time and space, being neither empty and infinite like the blue sky nor solid objects with measurable depth and dimension. Instead, they became another, liminal realm, where time stood still and space was collapsed in vaporous substance. Trees are also moments of collapsed time, circling it in concentric spirals around their trunks; past, present and future rising from the forest floor, offering millennia of remembered witness into the immediacy of the present. So, as we contemplate Litchfield’s forests, we find ourselves swept up into clouds of impenetrable matter, where forms are blurred and dimensions collapse; where time stands still in spirals of finite eternity and we become lost in the wonder of the sublime.

But these images of insubstantial, timeless presence are not just scenes of visual wonder. For, unlike tourists flocking to see a wonder of the natural world, these paintings turn us into explorers engulfed in the physical sensations of nature. Even if these forests were to disappear in the same way that most of New Zealand’s original forests have disappeared, lost to human settlement, agriculture and timber, these paintings will still hold residual echoes of their primeval substance in their tangled, swirling brushstrokes. With our haptic embodied gaze we will be able to feel ourselves push through their dense undergrowth and experience our skin tingling in their dappled half-light. And as we stand before them, lost in a moment of unfocused wandeing, made alive to the sensations of our own bodies, we might also find ourselves caught up in a moment of self reflection, a moment of wondering provoked by standing lost in the dark glowing spaces of these New Zealand forests.

Essay by Revd Dr Richard Davey

Co-ordinating Chaplain, Senior Research Fellow, Historical and Critical Studies Department of Visual Arts Nottingham Trent University

River Window 2023, oil on linen, 80 x 85 cm

Above: Fragment 1

2023, oil on panel, 40.5 x 30.5 x 2 cm

Right: The Earth Sweated With Primeval Sleep 2023, oil on linen, 81 x 66 x 2 cm

MARKET STREET WOODSTOCK

info@darleandthebear.co.uk

www.darleandthebear.co.uk . @darlebear

01993 357120

Cover image: detail of ‘Beckoning’, 2023, oil on linen, 71 x 81 x 2cm

Above: Old postcard of New Zealand