Events at Penwith Gallery

Featuring Sir Terry Frost's iconic 'Black Sun', 1976, and 'Standard Banbury', 1964.

Cornish artist Esme Lansdowne presents ‘A Soft Landing’, a new body of work created during a transformative chapter of returning to her homeland of Cornwall and entering motherhood. The exhibition marks both a creative and personal homecoming – a full- circle moment shaped by early artistic influences, deep emotional roots, and an evolving relationship with the land she calls home.

Created amidst the quiet intensity of early motherhood, these works reflect a shifting sense of time, identity, and place. Drawing on her material-led practice, Lansdowne uses natural earth pigments sourced from the Cornish landscape to create abstract works that respond to the elemental forces and textures of place. These works are reflections on belonging and the grounding pull of home.

Raised in St Ives and shaped by the legacy of artists like Barbara Hepworth and Peter Lanyon, Lansdowne continues this lineage of experimentation and deep connection to material and landscape. After years of travel and exploration, she returns to Cornwall to raise her family and create work that weaves together the inspirations gathered along the way.

‘A Soft Landing’ invites viewers into an emotional and sensory engagement with the land. A place where past and present converge, and where the gestures of paint and pigment become offerings to heritage, motherhood, and the notion of home. It is an invitation to pause, reflect, and land softly.

An emerging artist with a growing reputation, Esme has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Her most recent exhibition, ‘Intertwined Narratives’ showing at TwentySix Gallery, Wellington, marks her debut in New Zealand and features works created during her residency at Driving Creek Pottery in the Coromandel. Her work has been featured at galleries such as Anima Mundi in St. Ives and the Tyler Gallery in Mousehole.

Esme’s practice reflects her commitment to the land and the stories it holds, creating art that resonates with a sense of history and connection.

Vincent’s works evoke rather than describe the landscape. He spends hours sketching on the moor and by the sea, returns to his studio and reinvents the scenes from his imagination, using fragments of torn paper to create the shapes then paint and ink to explore the different textures, moods and muted colours of the landscape.

These have also been translated into the medium of oil or etching to give a slightly different view of the images. The materials play their part in the image. To quote Vincent: In my landscape work I seek to express more forcibly than mere description would allow. The rhythms, colours, textures are taken from the landscape but organised in such a way as to emphasise the two-dimensional design which is to me as important in the final image as the actual subject – for art is art, it is not reality.