A ring of lava floats in the sky, as if seen from afar. The rest of the world has fallen away and the orange ring of fire burns the eyes.

The piece is at once playful and childlike, yet speaks of natural disasters past and looming.

Hannah Luxton’s paintings explore the meeting point between the transcendental and the unknown, drawing on the Romantic idea that a divine presence resides within nature. Inspired by the sun, moon, stars, mountains, waterfalls, craters and ice caverns, she distils the natural world into archetypal, often abstract forms. Her work is also informed by Eastern philosophies of the Void, using bare linen to suggest a space beyond the material world and to dissolve the boundary between earth and cosmos. Luxton combines traditional painting methods with contemporary approaches, often working with single-pigment oils and rare natural pigments such as Malachite and Lapis Lazuli.

Hannah Luxton (b.1986) completed an MA at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in 2012 and a BA at Kingston University in 2009. In 2022 she was elected to The London Group, the prestigious artists’ collective founded in 1913. She is Director and curator of Glass Cloud Gallery, London. Her paintings are informed by residencies and research expeditions into remote landscapes, including Iceland, Switzerland and the American Southwest. Her work has been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and recognised by the Young Masters Art Prize and the East London Printmakers Prize. Her paintings are held in private and institutional collections in the UK, Iceland, USA and Australia, including Kings College Hospital, London.