For the past four decades, British artist Fiona Hingston's practice has been informed by a landscape that is no more or less special than other places to be found in the South West.

She lives and works in a small village on the edge of the Mendip Hills where her rooted intimacy to this particular place deepens her relationship to it year on year - there is always something new to investigate, to archive and to celebrate through a methodology of collecting, making and drawing. Materiality and making are at the core of her practice.

“I want a relationship with the materials I’m using, through developing personal connections that deepens my friendship and sense of place – getting the best from it, an honouring.

My drawings are made on paper surfaces prepared and sealed with layered combinations that include; earth, ash, emulsion, graphite, charcoal and indian ink.

The textured surface is central to the work. It took me a while to appreciate that one surface mixture will not do for every drawing, so there is often a lot of experimentation before the surface feels right.

Once prepared, drawings are developed by erasing this surface using a variety of tools. The image is drawn with a knife blade and improvised tools. I’m constantly finding new tools to work with, like the adapted craft drill I use as an eraser and lengths of willow stick with wire wool attached at the end used for scraping.

Scraping back, excavating, constantly revealing and refining the subject and exposing stains and imperfections over what can be long periods of time, embeds an image both in the paper and in my mind. It takes time to experiment, fail, reflect, abandon, remake – leading to an accumulation of knowledge (through the investigation of materials, medium and process) that allows things to reveal themselves. This is the most frustrating time as I try to make the connection between surface and subject. Often drawings will hang around for months, occasionally years and then be reworked.

"In a famous passage about getting lost as a child on Emmonsales Heath, John Clare wrote about walking along the furze (gorse) '...until I came out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers and birds seemed to forget me.' (The Garden Against Time – Olivia Laing, pub. Picador 2024). His knowledge was another way of saying his familiar ground, the place he knew, but also intimates that knowledge is itself a function of place, in which one’s capacity to make sense of things, to generate understanding, is a product of being someway rooted and at home, and that even more strikingly, this sense of home is reciprocal: that one doesn’t just know, but is known.”
Fiona Hingston