Fiona Hingston lives and works in a small village on the edge of the Mendip Hills.Much of her work has been informed by a landscape that is no more or less special than other places to be found in the South West.

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 methology of collecting, making anddrawing. Materiality and making are at the core of her practice.

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

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.” 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.
The Garden Against Time - Olivia Laing (pub Picador 2024)