Barbara Macfarlane

Barbara Macfarlane is a painter of the land and of the diverse human experiences that shape our relationship with it. Her large-scale works, typically executed in oil and ink, draw on elements of cartography and aerial imagery, examining how landscapes are experienced, understood, and remembered. Her subjects range from the rugged, olive-clad hills of south-eastern France to the stringent, grid-like matrix of Manhattan.

After graduating from Exeter School of Art in 1981, Macfarlane spent several years living and travelling in India. During this time, she established Khadi Papers, a paper mill in Karnataka, South India, specialising in exceptional handmade artist's paper. Composed of repurposed cotton rag from T-shirt offcuts, the paper's long fibres give it a remarkably thick and distinctive tooth, making every sheet unique. This richly textured surface is integral to Macfarlane's practice, contributing to the layered quality of her compositions and creating works that are at once tactile and pictorial, intimate in detail yet expansive in scale. Working with watercolour, oil paint, ink and gestural mark-making, she responds to the paper's materiality to make sense of the land's shape, boundaries, character and history.

Transcending solely Western traditions of representing the environment, Macfarlane also draws on indigenous painting traditions rooted in lived and inherited relationships with the land, including the bird's-eye perspective of Aboriginal desert painting. Many of her works hover at the edge of abstraction, encouraging viewers to imagine and evoke landscapes for themselves. Macfarlane's paintings are distinguished by an expressive painterly language of abbreviated forms and expressive brushwork that conjure the drama of expansive landscapes and their shifting relationships between land, sky and water.

Macfarlane's work is held in significant private and corporate collections worldwide. She has exhibited widely across Europe, North America and Asia, including at the Royal Academy in London and the Grand Palais in Paris.