The Arborealists: At the Water’s Edge

At the Water’s Edge brings together a contemporary response to trees and water by artists who live in urban and rural environments. These painters and printmakers are associated with two contemporary organisations: The Arborealists, which includes artists from the South West, South East, Yorkshire, London, and Wales, France, and Ireland, and the Urban Contemporaries, whose artists live in London. 

At the Water’s Edge celebrates their shared love of trees and the vital role they can play in all our lives, in terms of our Well-Being, Identity and Sociability, and our understanding of Ecology and Climatic Change. As the author Hermann Hesse observed: When we have learned how to listen to trees, then our thoughts’ brevity, quickness, and childlike hastiness achieve an incomparable joy. At a time of international anxiety about the existential threats of the effects of global warming, the role of nature and trees in the United Kingdom has never been more pertinent. It has been estimated that we need to plant two billion trees, in an attempt to avert disaster. This exhibition thus aims, with a political slant, to raise awareness of the importance of trees in all our lives. Themes and issues explored in this exhibition are street architecture; urban decoration; ecological dimensions; wildlife habitats; the mythical, the allegorical, and the symbolic; our psychological equilibrium and well-being; trees in opposition to/in harmony with buildings; depositories of history and bearing witness; unexpected trees in unexpected places; iconic and loved trees/nuisance and unloved trees/diseased trees; and boundary markers/noise excluders/ barriers against pollution. BUT MOST IMPORTANT TREES CLOSE TO WATER. Those two elements the sky, and the water are always visually connected to each other with trees.

Website: www.arborealists.com

Instagram: @the_arborealists

Please note: during this exhibition, we request that dogs (other than service animals) are not brought into the gallery