I have lived and worked in a remote part of central Italy for twenty-five years, in a landscape that exists in a time bubble, suspended, lost, saturated with golden light. I walk daily through abandoned farmland, forest and scrub, land that impoverished farmers spent millennia clearing and husbanding and that now grows back untended. The paintings evoke this landscape, its fierce indifference and the nostalgia for a lost human relationship with the land. Figurative elements, allusions to vegetation, lit landforms and the structure of branches, arrive by osmosis rather than direct observation.

My work grows from a dialogue with landscape, first opened up to me by Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia, made in this part of Italy. Alongside painting, I have spent a decade building an evolving colour library of thousands of hand-made swatches, constructed from a limited palette using a mathematical formula. The library is not the work; it is the way in. It gives me an acute sensitivity to the intervals between colours, often almost imperceptible shifts that carry the emotional content of a painting. The chaos and the system are inseparable. The method enables the freedom. The paintings themselves are made fast, in a concentrated, almost wordless moment, when movement arrives through the body before thought catches up. In an age of digitally pre-conceived image-making, this spontaneity feels increasingly precious and fragile.

SUE KENNINGTON (b. 1955, London) lives and works in London and Italy. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, London. Recent exhibitions include Small is Beautiful, Flowers Gallery, London (2024, 2025); Clearing, Curvapura, Rome (2023); and Colour Flex, Terrace Gallery, London (2022). Other notable exhibitions include Premio Lissone, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Lissone (2018), and Contemporary British Painting, Huddersfield Art Gallery (2014). She was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome (2015) and has undertaken residencies at Vermont Studio Center, USA, and ACAVA Milchhof, Berlin. Her work is held in the collections of University of the Arts London, Coventry University, Liverpool University and Paintings in Hospitals.