Art Exhibition: Experiencing Landscape

Joy Hillyer’s paintings aim to convey a sense of place, of placement and exploration within the landscape.

She is concerned with the ambiguity of the liminal: the juxtaposition of the real and the imagined; the interplay between essence and symbol, between light and darkness; the ephemeral and the enduring.

Her work often uses her photographs as a starting point or as the ‘outer shell’ for her painting. These may be of the natural world or the built landscape, or the interaction between them. Particular events or echoes of memory convey layers of meaning within a deceptively pared-down landscape. Some paintings refer more overtly to the tradition of landscape painting with an echo of Romanticism and the Sublime; others are on a smaller scale and focus on detail. They reveal a sharpness, tension and energy that is unsentimental. Colour is as important as form.

Hillyer’s work inhabits the shifting boundary between landscape and abstraction. It rarely includes figures: instead, the individual is invited into a solitary experience of what Peter Doig describes as ‘between the actuality of the scene and something that is in your head’.

Joy Hillyer had a career in law and legal education before taking an honours degree in garden design and attending art courses taught by Sophie Hacker. From 2012 to 2014 she attended Advanced Painting Practice at Morley College, London (tutors Steve Wright and Guillem Ramos-Porqui). After seven years in Central London, she now works from her studio in Wiltshire.

There is a free Open Evening on Thursday 19 September from 6-8pm. Please RSVP to info@sarum.ac.uk

The exhibition is free. A price list for individual works will be available from reception.

Further details at www.joyhillyer.com