2025 - How does your Garden grow?

This year will be the third iteration of the Williamscot Art Groups participation in Oxfordshire Artweeks. Our theme this year was settled upon one chilly morning last autumn in Juliet’s kitchen with tea, coffee, banana bread and notepads to hand. The garden is a place we all enjoy and take refuge in and it just clicked for us all. Ideas started jumping into our minds instantly!

I love being out in the garden and every year come spring I’m overtaken by this mad urge to sow every seed going. The first few shoots give me such pleasure followed by satisfaction weeks or months later when we get to harvest whatever has survived my amateur skills, periods of inattentiveness and the whims of British weather!

I find there’s something so romantic and engaging about the kitchen garden - how a patch of land set aside to be a functional space can’t help but be beautiful by the varying qualities of the individual plants that make up the whole. So for me I will be focusing primarily on what can be harvested from a garden and the beauty that can be found in everyday vegetables when you really look close.

What appeals to me most about our theme is embracing that ‘slow living’ attitude that so often escapes us. You cannot rush a seedling and the same applies to a painting. I recently returned to work after maternity leave and now really relish those moments - either in the garden or with my paintbrushes - where I’m not racing through a list of tasks. My son has gone to bed and I’m able to zone out from the giant to do list and focus instead on the painting in front of me. I’m currently working on a close up of a cabbage and I am really enjoying the challenge of recreating that on a canvas - it turns out cabbages have a lot more going on than I ever realised!

My contributions to the exhibition will be primarily acrylic paintings with perhaps a few pen drawings thrown in here and there.

I love our art group and how creative everyone is. We each have different experiences which in turn are shaping how we are interpreting the theme. By each bringing something different to the table I hope that each visitor will find pieces that speak to them whilst sparking conversation on how they would respond to the same prompt. I feel very fortunate to be in such a supportive group where we are real cheerleaders of each other and visitors will hopefully feel this too by how cohesive the final exhibition will be.