Arboretum

Sarah Wiseman Gallery presents Arboretum, a contemporary landscape collection exploring the enduring presence of trees and our connection to them. Featuring paintings, photography, prints, and mixed-media works, the exhibition brings together UK-based artists Daniel Ablitt, Bee Bartlett, Rory Carnegie, Clare Halifax, Luella Martin, Mark Munroe-Preston and Trevor Price, whose practices reflect emotional, environmental, and historical relationships with the natural world.

Arboretum considers how trees function as symbols of memory, refuge, and ecological awareness within contemporary landscape art. Through diverse approaches to material, process, and place, the exhibition highlights trees as a site for personal reflection and environmental engagement.

Daniel Ablitt’s contemporary landscape paintings explore the psychological resonance of place. Rather than depicting specific locations, his works combine remembered landscapes—often inspired by Nordic Forest environments—into atmospheric scenes featuring small, solitary figures that invite personal projection.

Bee Bartlett’s mixed-media landscape paintings investigate memory and materiality. Incorporating found materials gathered from the places she depicts, her recent works draw on walks through Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, resulting in richly textured compositions.

Rory Carnegie’s photographic practice explores ancient landscapes and elemental forces. Using in-camera layering techniques, his recent works—made on the Scottish island of Islay—capture the movement of trees shaped by wind, fire, land, and water.

Clare Halifax’s detailed drawings reimagine urban landscapes as spaces of growth. Focusing on pockets of nature within London, she combines bold colour, pattern, and mark-making to celebrate the coexistence of city life and trees.
Luella Martin creates solar etchings and paintings informed by repeated visits to the same landscapes. Her work explores how memory, light, and time shape our perception of place.

Mark Munroe-Preston creates digitally layered tree landscapes with photography, paintings, drawings, textures, and found objects. Some of the landscapes he depicts are based on real places, while others are amalgamations of his own imaginings. Mark says, ‘For me landscapes without trees feel like they are missing something, trees are such an integral part of our perception of the world about us.’

Trevor Price produces highly detailed relief prints inspired by the Cornish countryside. Beginning with photography, he abstracts forest paths and treescapes through pixelation and carving, with the material surface echoing the organic forms of the landscape.