A Place Between the Pines: Art, Nature and the Transcendent Function

By Lucy von Goetz

In trying to understand anything, we look for a way in. What is the entry point that allows further unravelling? The way in here is between. You need to get inside and feel it.

The exhibition, A Place Between the Pines, takes its name from the indelible light that flickers across your vision as you walk among trees. Light seeping through glades. That flashing in the rearview mirror of a car as the landscape disintegrates behind you. The blinking surge of 24 frames a second in old films. The pauses between some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour.

These betweens are not gaps, they are seams where things meet and change one another.

A Place Between the Pines treats landscape as vital, not as a theatre set for human narratives. Weather that enters the body; soil that remembers labour; light that alters what we believe we see. To stand among pines is to realise perception is ecological and our attention is a kind of climate.

The exhibition comes at a moment when so much of life is routed elsewhere, unrooted, into screens, efficiencies, predictive logics. The technosphere overlays the ecosphere; our inner fervour flattened into data.

“To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances… that’s what life is all about, that’s its task,” wrote Dostoyevsky to his brother after his death sentence was repealed. Death, that great clarifying force, revealed to him the central task of life: to remain human. Two centuries later, that task feels newly urgent. What does it mean to remain human in an age increasingly shaped by technological abstraction, disembodied intelligence, and the cold logic of computation? What happens to feeling, mortality, imagination and soul when the inner life is translated into data?

At the heart of this crisis is the compartmentalisation of experience visible in the polarities of Western thought: past and future, individual and society, masculine and feminine, body and soul, culture and nature. Pulsating beneath it all is a dissociation from the body, and therefore from mortality. Everything beautiful that we touch and see and hear reminds us that we have a body, and that to have a body is to be finite.

Carl Jung offers a counterpoint to some of this. For Jung, the psyche is not a private compartment sealed off from the world, but the foundation of all perception, experience, thought, feeling and action. It is the place where inner and outer meet. It might be the path through the growing abstraction.

For writer Glen Slater: “It is the psyche that contains the pursuit of the angelic, the claims of the animal body, and the structures and dynamics that join the two. It is the psyche that generates and insists upon the symbolic expressions of culture, which are often based on the transformative and aspirational power of ordinary, even elemental, things — mountains and rivers, suns and moons, fire and rain — thereby reminding us of the inextricable bond between mind and world.”

This exhibition asks how art might return us to forms of attention that are embodied, emotional, symbolic and ecological. Restoring ambiguity, contradiction, and depth. Jung gave us a workable name for the idea of letting contradiction breathe.

The tension of opposites.

Wholeness, for Jung, was not simply a peace treaty between competing conditions but the capacity to embrace them until a third thing appears. Transcendence as an emergence, not an exit. He called it the “transcendent function”. There is a sense of becoming, of creating.

A Place Between the Pines considers trees in their fullness as a framing metaphor. Rooted and skyward, resinous and airy, surface and subsurface in one body. To contemplate a tree is to concede what does not show: roots braided in fungal conversation, water moving in the dark, time working in hidden rings.

The grounds of Crowsley Park are made up of pines, yew tree avenues, paths, clearings. The impressive park is not total wilderness, nor is it a structured, groomed garden. It is a terrain shaped by cultivation, memory, and slow nature herself. It is within this state of in-betweenness that the exhibition situates itself.

Balance, the perennial modern prescription, often lapses into stasis. The artworks in this exhibition do not look for poise so much as aliveness. They inhabit friction: inner/outer, order/erosion, memory/perception, belonging/displacement, death/spirit and let meaning move within the charge. Heraclitus would have recognised the current: the way up and the way down are one and the same.

What follows are artworks that recalibrate attention as a cognitive and ethical practice. They slow perception, reintroduce ambiguity as a legitimate mode of knowledge, and treat landscape as an active system in which psychic and ecological processes influence and shape one another.

Art, then, becomes a mode of listening, of attention. Art is an organised response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. It transforms potential recognition into an unceasing one.

Artists

Alicja Biała

For Biala, land is rarely uncomplicated. It is entangled with history and stories. Biala’s practice blends scientific research with folk and myth.

Investigating abandoned mining sites across Europe, Biala collects acidic water from tailing ponds. These industrial by-products of extractive economies are among the most toxic environments on the continent.

The artist submerges her metal plates in these waters for extended periods, allowing chemical reactions between acid, metal, and time to inscribe the surface. Biala has worked with a team of environmental scientists and engineers who specialise in mining waste and soil remediation to perfect her methodology. You can see the result of this in her work, Study (7) in the exhibition.

Sculpture makes up a large part of Biala’s practice. Three of her bronze Hyperaccumulator sculptures you can find in the Palm House. These works were fabricated to transform fragile agents of repair into grand and enduring forms. Hyperaccumulators are a specific plant species capable of absorbing heavy metals from polluted soil, offering one of the few known biological methods for long-term remediation of toxic landscapes. The artist collects these plants from contaminated sites, sculpts them, and casts them in bronze. Her material of choice is the language of permanence and power. There is a tenderness in her practice, elevating these natural healers from unrecognised nettles to a story that can be cast into public memory. Beauty and responsibility wrapped up in one. 

Max Bainbridge

In Bainbridge’s hands the tree becomes a mediator between inner life and external site: a living being translated into a tactile form that holds absence as presence.

The artist’s monumental sculpture, Hallowed is a mighty section of horse chestnut tree that Bainbridge has hollowed out by hand. He describes this process as “coring”. A painstakingly physical mission, the work retains the original footprint of the fallen tree and becomes a sort of skin. This act of removal is inherently symbolic for Bainbridge, to see what is inside something, what is underneath, to extract the within.

This presence of absence makes me think of saudade. A Portuguese word used to describe a profound longing for something absent. It is one of those almost untranslatable words. It is not entirely negative, Portuguese writer, Manuel de Melo describes it as, “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.”

The sculpture Bainbridge leaves us with is a delicate, undulating armature of pale, velvety wood that holds its presence as if a living being. What begins as a dense, weighty form is gradually stripped back, refined, and opened, revealing an inner surface that reads as bodily, alabaster-like, sinewy, almost fleshy in its softness and tonal variation.

From the “core” that Bainbridge extracted from Hallowed, he created Crucible. A perfect and complete vessel emerged from that great mass. For the artist thoughts around recycling and creating out of a sculpted void are key to the work’s transformation.

Influences ripple through: Phyllida Barlow’s physical candour, Rachel Whiteread’s inversions, David Nash’s arboreal gravitas, a Bacon-like insistence on flesh. Bainbridge’s physical dialogue with material reaches a quiet which is hard-won.

Bainbridge describes seeking a quality akin to the stillness felt in a church or forest clearing, a moment where the outside world recedes and attention deepens. In this sense the works offer a subtle reverence. Within the Jungian framework of the exhibition, Hallowed can be understood as an embodiment of the transcendent function, where removal becomes revelation, and where the tension between interior and exterior, loss and presence, gives rise to a form that feels, in the artist’s own words, “as close to spirituality” as sculpture can reach.

Johanna Bath

Winter Rose is a lesson in tender obscurity. Leaves, stems, rose; everything arrives blurred as through the lens of recollection. The melancholic register of Winter Rose aligns with Bath’s understanding of melancholy as “the feeling of loss of the present,” yet the work does not subside into nostalgia.

The painting invites a mode of looking that is attentive, producing an experience that approaches stillness, even as its subject is the constant movement of time.

In the artist’s own words, “I am madly in love with life, with the wonder it holds, the blissful moments, even the heartbreak, the hurt, the loss. Because I am so aware that every moment is a singular sensation and won’t come back. I am pushing myself to be aware of every second passing, paying attention to even the most insignificant things that add up to be my life."

Anna Blom

Blom begins outside and lets the world write on the work, always starting with unstretched canvas.  Surfaces are weathered by rain, debris, Thames mud, dust, and light.

The paintings act as “energy fields” of seasonality, place, and sensation. There is a physicality of emotion in Blom’s practice. Environmental exposure becomes both method and metaphor: a willingness to let the world impress itself upon the work, just as the psyche is shaped by forces beyond conscious control.

Whisper into the Void was started in the artist’s native Sweden and finished in London. The artist described her sense of being humbled when looking up at the sky and what it means to stand on the soil. This celestial landscape forms part of the artist’s diaristic methodology.

Blom’s Hallowed Grounds stems from the artist cycling through London during balmy summer evenings, listening to the echoes of people existing around her. This work was formed on Hammersmith Bridge. Blom described what it was like listening to the pain and joy of the community around her permeating the thick air. Speaking of this work Blom pointed out that these “ephemeral junctures” were of interest “because they behave like a painted philosophy, an unruly, particle-filled cosmoses”.

The resulting images feel grounded and elsewhere, echoing Blom’s own observation that we are “constantly elsewhere”. Within the context of A Place Between the Pines, her work renders the “between” as a lived condition: a space of attention, where histories, bodies, environments, and emotions remain in continuous, unresolved relation.

Tereza Červeňová

Červeňová’s photograph, Cathedral of San Pedro, brings the exhibition’s “between” into the realm of faith and collective passage.

Made in Mexico in 2022 on her first journey after the isolation of the pandemic, the work emerges from a trip shaped by friendship and community. The image centres on a tall, arched opening, reminiscent of a cathedral window. What fills the opening is not glass but a simple plastic sheet, stretched across an unfinished space in a former factory.

Through this provisional surface tree-filtered light diffuses, transforming the everyday material into something radiant and reverent. Soft greens and milky whites blur interior and exterior into a brilliant breath of awe. There is a precise tension between the sacred and the makeshift, the accidental and the transcendent.

Červeňová resists organised religion yet speaks of a belief in serendipity, beauty and nature. The artist locates spirituality in encounter.

Salvatore Fiorello

Undergrowth, Embankment, Edge of Sundown, Cornwall Gardens are partial scenes remembered. Light flickers and dusk condenses to violet. Points of colour hang like pollen. The artist paints from photographs and recollection but lets the paintings keep their raw integrity. Having moved countries as a child, Fiorello paints locations that are also feelings.

Light is the primary agent of this instability. Fiorello’s surfaces are animated by dappled, flickering illumination, an effect drawn from his own encounters with movement, whether cycling through tree-lined streets or recalling the shifting patterns of sunlight passing through leaves. This light is charged with the sense that something is about to change.

Lavinia Harrington

Working with some of the lightest papers she has used to date Harrington pushes the limits of what such a surface can bear. Folding and saturating them until they become sites of endurance. Her approach draws on an art-historical and devotional lineage in which light is depicted and made palpable: from Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in Cortona, where illumination moves contemplatively through space, to the Rothschild Canticles’ medieval renderings of radiance as something shifting and musical.

This luminosity finds a more psychic register in Harrington’s affinity with Leonora Carrington where the body and the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds remain in constant flux.

Colour becomes choral. Light emerges from darkness and recedes back into it. The two pieces, My heart is like a bird carry an intimate proximity to grief and love. The paper becomes a kind of membrane and archive. The pigments the artist uses are charged with personal significance: quinacridone golds and bronzes, associations of vitality and inheritance, now rendered finite through the artist’s inability to continue using them. What remains is a body of work that insists on fragility as a condition of profound strength and a capacity to absorb and transmit what exceeds language.

Callum Harvey

Harvey paints time sideways. Borrowing Lawrence Durrell’s phrase about the “geometrical insanity of day followed by night” Harvey works from his own Super 8 film footage of skies at dusk, where colour abandons outline and atmosphere becomes ground. Harvey’s paintings inhabit the cyclical logic of natural systems.

Hazy greens and pinks of evening shift gradually into indigo and violet, forming gradients that resist fixed boundaries.

Harvey’s engagement with film theory, particularly through Erika Balsom’s writing on the oceanic image, situates his work within a broader understanding of “smooth space”. If the sea, in Balsom’s account, becomes a surface through which time is registered and transformed, Harvey’s skies operate similarly. The act of filming, and subsequently translating that footage into paint, becomes a process of transfiguration.

The idea of an unbounded field where distinctions dissolve into intensities was very much put to us by Deleuze and Guattari. In Deleuze's view, art ruptures extensive or everyday perception because it draws attention to singular 'intensities' (such as the vibrancy of a colour).

Materially for Harvey this is achieved through the accumulation of thin, translucent layers of oil paint. Each layer functions as a veil and a window, interacting with those beneath it to produce a subtle, internal luminosity, a backlit glow.

Harvey’s dusk skies recall Georgia O’Keeffe’s vast, unbounded landscapes in which the act of looking becomes inseparable from sensation. Like O’Keeffe, Harvey locates a liminal interval where the external world and internal experience converge.

Beatrice Hasell‑McCosh

With drawing as the starting point, Hasell-McCosh produces close studies in situ which are grown into two temperaments.

In Daisies and Alliums, delicate washes of watercolour show an imagined garden in a state of quiet attentiveness. The work’s pale greens, muted violets and soft yellows move across the paper.

Huge if true amplifies this same botanical world into something immersive, unstable, and almost hallucinatory. Flowers dissolve into vibrant accumulations of pinks, peaches, turquoise and gold, their forms continually breaking apart and reforming through gestural brushwork and chromatic intensity. Scale becomes psychologically charged: petals and leaves no longer behave as descriptive forms but as energetic structures that engulf the viewer within a dense and fluctuating visual environment.

Titles in Hasell-McCosh’s work pull literature and pop idiom into play, adding tilt and aftertaste.

Henry Hudson

Hudson pushes painting until it’s winking at geology. The scagliola works, pigmented plaster layered on canvas, sealed with beeswax feel like “fossilised postcards”, in Hudson’s own words. Turner’s dissolutions and Monet’s light watch over them, time is longer.

In a Jungian sense the work’s unruly materiality performs the return of what painting often represses; its bodily, impasto, even performative substrate.

One canvas clouds into deep green and molten yellow around a central reflection; another opens into cobalt and sea-green, a red-orange sun doubled by its own water.

Scagliola, once an architectural trick for fake marble, becomes a living crust: poured, cracked, polished, eroded. Image and object subside. Permanence/impermanence, atmosphere/matter, reflection/stone. The paintings sit on those fault lines. Anselm Kiefer’s sedimented histories are a distant cousin; Hudson’s horizon is less apocalyptic, more tidal.

Jin Han Lee

Lee’s painting, Where We Meet was partly inspired by the artist’s reading of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. Tolstoy’s story centres around a Prince seeking spiritual redemption for a past sin. The work explores the collision and eventual reconciliation between past and present selves.

At its centre a bright yellow pane opens like a sanctuary, a contained zone of warmth and stability. Lee depicts the meeting of these two personas (past and present) in this section. In contrast the area outside this space signifies the tension of an unreconciled self, characterised by a sense of danger, where gestures become more volatile. Lee weaves her paintbrush inwards to that brilliant sun of self-integration and peace.

Where We Meet can be understood as an enactment of the transcendent function within the framework of this exhibition. Its central glow suggests possibility.

“There are many faiths, but the spirit is one — in me, and in you, and in him. So that if everyone believes himself, all will be united; everyone be himself and all will be as one.” – Tolstoy

Jemima Moore

Eleanor of Aquitaine and Rococo Arcade ripple like ponds, images are dropped in and dissolve. These paintings are built and sanded back, layered with dots and petal‑like flecks. In the depths of the works we catch a reflection, lose it, start again. This oscillation produces a visual experience akin to looking into water, a recurring metaphor in Moore’s thinking. Surface/depth, clarity/ambiguity circulate until the eye adopts a calmer sort of attention.

Dapples of saturated blues, pinks, golds and greens punctuate layered ground. These dispersed gestures activate the surface rhythmically, echoing the language of textiles and embroidery that inform Moore’s practice.

Martine Poppe

Poppe’s When we were here depicts a lake in the artist’s native Norway, near a former family home. Poppe has been returning to this refuge since 2013, despite it not being in the family anymore. Recently the artist’s brother rowed her round the lake until she captured the motifs she needed for this work. The painting depicts an hour just before midnight, the latest dusk.

Painted in translucent layers on polyester restoration fabric, the image appears as though it were surfacing slowly from within the canvas. Up close, the landscape fragments into gesture and shifting colour, Poppe describes how this effect for her feels like pixels, which provides a neat nod to her use of digital technologies in her process. From a distance the painting coheres again into a scene of uncanny stillness. This oscillation between legibility and dissolution is central to Poppe’s practice.

The artist’s latest body of work confronts water directly. Water has been a subject Poppe feels she has been circling around in her practice for a long time. Thinking of liminal spaces, folkloric myths, life-giving properties, and sexual connotations around ideas of wetness. Liquid becomes a subtle language of arousal without slipping into stereotype or spectacle.

What is absent in Poppe’s paintings is just as integral as what is present. Poppe avoids depicting anything manmade or human. A ripple of sunlight across water is granted the same ontological weight as the absent human observer. Poppe questions the arbitrary hierarchy of importance society places on things.

When we were here can be considered from a post-anthropocentric position, where the landscape is not backdrop but participant where no single form claims supremacy over another.

Jessie Stevenson

Stevenson’s Serendipity in the Air and Absorbing Time situate landscape within a fluid territory between memory and myth, where place is always unfolding through recollection. Emerging from a two-year period of research at the Slade centred around the River Glaven and the ecological fragility of Norfolk’s chalk rivers, the works begin from observation and walking.

In Serendipity in the Air, this sensibility expands into an immersive field of saturated colour - fiery oranges, pinks, and yellows that dash across the canvas. The suggestion of rhododendron blooms dissolve into gestural marks, so that figuration and abstraction remain in constant negotiation.

Absorbing Time offers a quieter register of this same inquiry. Colour softens into pale blues, ochres and muted pinks.

Jill Tate

Tate has been exclusively using a terracotta colour in her paintings. The Italian meaning, “baked earth”. Tate makes her own paint using linseed oil and natural earth pigments, this allows the materials to be as simple and natural as possible. For Tate, terracotta goes beyond aesthetics, she explains the philosophical and material significance of iron oxide. Iron is everywhere, present in the earth and our bodies, offering a continuity between the human and the natural world. The warmth of terracotta, derived from the chemical reactions of iron and oxygen, connects the cosmos with the human. Tate uses terracotta as a medium for exploring belonging, from the warmth of a room to the red surface of a star.

In Wait it out quantum anxiety hums in the background of the domestic and the banal. There is an uncanny stillness in the work. Reality, it suggests, is an event, not a fact: jointly formed between object and looker.

Tate speaks about the shoreline, with its endless reshaping by waves, denoting the passage of time and the persistence of nature’s cycles.

The artist’s paintings offer room for thought. By using minimalist interiors and natural materials she blurs the boundary between internal and external worlds. The work is not just compelling but also consoling. You can forget yourself and become as porous and borderless as the earth, pleasurably adrift on the currents of time.

Yijia Wu

Wu’s work positions “home” as an uncertain construct, made and unmade through everyday objects. Wu’s Fallen Pear deals in ideas of migration, memory, and separation, where language becomes a structuring force of emotional life.

Carved from alabaster and paired with a delicately cast metal spoon as its stem, the work is rooted in a Chinese cultural taboo in which the act of “sharing a pear” (分梨, fēn lí) is avoided because it is a homophone for “separation” or “parting” (分离, fēn lí). Within this linguistic overlap, a simple gesture - cutting and sharing fruit - becomes symbolically charged, carrying the potential to fracture relationships.

Wu draws on this belief as a conceptual hinge: transforming the pear into a solid, indivisible form that resists the act it culturally prohibits. This sculpture shows the desire for connection and the inevitability of distance, a profound expression of enduring attachment.

Xu Yang

Centrefold (How long is the fleet of one lifetime?) one of Xu’s rich and intricate still life paintings, offers us identity as theatre and shrine.

Emerging from a deep engagement with Chinese mythology, Rococo excess, and the coded language of objects, Xu’s painting operates as psychic tableau. The artist shows us a surreal mix of intimacy and performance, luxury and labour, desire and mortality.

At the base of the still life sits the hulu vessel, a traditional Chinese vase associated with fortune and spiritual containment. These vases were historically imagined as a vessel for immortals and divine elixirs. Xu transforms it into a container of psychic inheritance, placing upon its lower bulb an opulent Dutch still life of lobster, lemons, bread and wine: symbols of abundance and extravagance that stand in tension with the quieter ethics embodied in the wheat and farmer painted above and inverted.

A mouse hidden in the hair recalls Cinderella’s “little helpers,” and symbolises ordinary people and the artist’s own feelings of precarity and estrangement during the pandemic, when living in London as a Chinese artist became marked by alienation and unease.

Qing Dynasty nail guards, historically worn by imperial concubines to signify exemption from labour contrast with humbler symbols of effort and survival. Xu intensifies these tensions through the language of Chinese opera gestures: the delicately poised hand, derived from the cheng lu gesture meaning “bearing the dew,” evokes femininity as something performed and fragile. The kingfisher, traditionally used in Qing jewellery crafted from iridescent feathers, hovers protectively above the blue floral ornament, binding together ideas of beauty and preservation.

To conclude...  

The artworks in A Place Between the Pines nudge perception away from abstraction’s chill and toward the simmering intelligence of things.

Trees grant us some of the richest metaphors for our lives, a polished lens on the quality of attention we pay the world. William Blake wrote that, “the tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way”. Walt Whitman considered nature a powerful healer, “how it all nourishes, lulls me,” he exulted, “in the way most needed; the open air, the rye-fields, the apple orchards.” 

The record of Whitman’s communion with the natural world is written in Specimen Days, a collection of prose fragments and diary entries, restoring the word “specimen” to its Latin origin in specere: “to look at.” What emerges is a jubilant celebration of the art of seeing, so native to us yet so easily bypassed.

And perhaps this is all to say that looking at nature might be our simplest entry point to so many of the betweens. And that beyond nature, art might be a more intricate door leading us into the rose-garden of Eliot’s Burnt Norton.

Notes

For Hermann Hesse the key to existential joy was in learning how to listen to the trees:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

[…]

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin