Penelope Brook, 'lichen song'

Penelope Brook is a New Zealand-born, Oxford-based artist whose abstract, mixed-media works are born of her habit of meandering walks, and her love of nature’s small and unexpected beauties.  She is particularly interested in lichens, mosses and fungi: the way they soften a gravestone or a log pile; the way they charge the grey of stone, the grey of winter with improbable and seductive colour; their persistence; their vulnerability to our disregard.  She takes inspiration from the journeyers in Chinese landscape paintings, small in the immensity of nature.  From Durer, stepping down from a stagecoach to be smitten by a patch of grasses.  From the floral marginalia of late-medieval tapestries.  She describes her work as both a way of holding and sharing the joy of slow, quiet observation, and as an invitation to care - believing in the fierce power of love and wonder in sustaining activism to sustain biodiversity.

Grids stitch across much of Penelope’s work, but she resists a simple metaphor.  (She quotes Agnes Martin: “When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees.”)  Her grids were born of walking: echoing footfall, keeping time, marking out space and attention. Hand-stitched rather than drawn or painted, they at once float across and pierce the surface of the work in attachment and detachment, in conversation between front and back.  Sometimes they carry echoes of the biologist’s quadrat grid.  Sometimes they are a gathering net that might hold a fragment of fibre of colour, that might hold the eye.  Always they carry a memory of warp and weft, of the cloth that holds safe.

Penelope made the pieces in the current exhibition during and following a month at Ós Textile Residency in northern Iceland in April 2025.  They are born of Iceland’s confounding landscapes (large and small), of basalt and quartz, cliff and fissure; of the shocking brightnesses of alpine lichens; of late snow on last season’s grasses; of the discombobulating coincidence of lengthy light and deep cold; of the seeming infinity of northward sea.

Penelope graduated MA (Textiles) from the Royal College of Art in 2023, specializing in mixed media.  She has exhibited in in the UK and Europe, including as a Will Gompertz selection at the 2024 ING Discerning Eye exhibition, and undertaken art residencies in Scotland and Iceland.