Why from Chalk to Ice? Emma Jamison explains:

“I grew up surrounded by woodlands, with a view of the rolling South Downs, which as a child I sometimes imagined was a huge tidal wave. I watched them change colours throughout the seasons and years, from greens to sprinkles of yellow and orange, then purple to blues in the winter, then with skeleton-like trees revealing the ground beneath.

”It was the winter that excited me most, and I wanted to capture it through charcoal and paint.

“I thought Iceland would look like England during the Ice Age. Bleak, naked and raw with no green fields, or forests filled with tall oak and beech woodlands. Just rocks, rivers and sheets of ice and snow. 

“I had the idea to walk from the north coast to the south of Iceland with my tent, food, and a small lightweight sketch book and some charcoal. I knew I would never grasp it completely, but I wanted to try and capture something; a flash of its soul or its language and see where that would take me.

“However the landscape that had excited me as being wild, open and fresh, turned out to be harsher and more challenging than I had imagined.

The paintings in this exhibition stem from that challenge.”