'Immersed & Imbued': 8 Women Artists on Abstraction and Expressionism in Britain’s Contemporary Landscapes

Susan Cordes is a contemporary artist who seeks to evoke the essence of the British landscape: the elemental forces and the unique quality and atmosphere that shape the UK countryside, coasts, fens, and rivers. Her process evolves intuitively through an engagement with materials and making, responding to marks, shapes, colour, and texture. She endeavours to convey a sense of place – a feeling rather than a representation. www.susancordes.co.uk

Tessa Houghton uses oils to create dreamlike ethereal landscapes that are infused with light, texture, and infinite possibilities. Inspired by nature with its inherent symbolism and contrasts, her paintings tend to hover between abstraction and figuration and explore themes of fragility and strength, transience and endurance, death and renewal. Often her works pay homage to childhood places and family and explore the strong emotional attachments we have with such places and the memories that go with them. She is especially drawn to liminal spaces, where water meets land or land meets sky as in-between areas that feel mysterious and full of suggestion.

Since receiving a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Liverpool John Moores University in 1998, Houghton’s work has been exhibited and collected throughout the UK and internationally, including in Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Singapore. www.tessahoughton.com

Felicity Keefe’s contemporary landscape paintings are inspired by her experience of the British landscape as it changes in flux and reacts to seasons, weather, and time. Her work is distinctive for its sense of atmosphere, often brooding, but also starkly beautiful. In Keefe’s art, we see time working its magic in front of us. Nature is in constant transition, and she captures this motion and fluidity through colour and tone. She is also inspired by blending traditional landscape, literature, and personal mythology – forming an inner narrative within each series.

Keefe currently lives and works in Bath. She has exhibited throughout the UK and internationally in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Paris, and Singapore. www.felicitykeefe.com

Joanne Last was born in Surrey and has lived in and around London all her life. She originally trained as a classical pianist, but coming from a family of artists, has followed both disciplines throughout her career. Working intuitively and experimentally, Joanne’s work takes on many forms: abstract, urban, coastal, and landscape. The driving force of her work is all in the process. She works fast and freely, layering paint, building texture, finding colour surprises, and creating rich surfaces from many iterations to arrive at a place of completion. www.joannelast.co.uk

Gina Parr is a painter as well as a photographer who ‘paints’ with her camera whilst traveling away from her studio. Her work explores scape, memory, and identity. Her childhood, spent diversely in wide-open spaces with her father fishing for mackerel and at home with her mother’s hoarding and mental health issues, defined her relationship to the sea and land: the spirit and memory of the open space, evoking freedom and connectedness and the dark uncertainty of the deep. Her work is an expression of the intermingling of joy and pain, love and loss: the human condition, tracking the line between abstraction and figuration.

Parr lives and works in both Devon and London’s East End. She has exhibited throughout the UK and internationally in Denmark, Italy, and France. She has completed commissions in the Middle East, Belgium, London, and the USA and has had her work featured on the sets of numerous British television dramas. www.ginaparr.com

Tania Rutland‘s work is concerned with the push/pull of representation and abstraction. She practices across oil painting, etching, and drawing, each medium with unique processes that feed each other in the creation of new work. She has been fascinated by the way in which generations of human activity have shaped the landscape of the countryside in East and West Sussex, noticing what has been left behind through the consequence of human presence. Attuned to this ‘humanised countryside’ and the flux of weather, she uses mixtures of memory/remembrance, drawn or photographed features, and original source material to capture various patterns of tracks and paths, broken fences, desire lines that  slowly formed over time, and the movements of animal grazing and people through the landscape.

Rutland is based in Brighton. Her work has been exhibited and collected throughout the UK and abroad. www.taniarutland.co.uk

Helen Simms is a contemporary painter best known for her large-scale, often monochromatic ethereal abstract paintings with subtle pops of colour. Inspired by Abstract Expressionism, her canvases are a means through which she can process thoughts, her place in the world, and a better understanding of herself. Her work is painterly, layered, and abstract with choices that invite contemplation, introspection, and a sense of calm. She enjoys exploring the dreamlike feelings evoked by snapshots of landscapes, often showing their ‘magic hour’ and water reflections – as if from a parallel universe, one’s own subconscious, or memory.

Simms holds a BA (Hons) and MA in History of Art from the University of Leicester and University College London respectively. She is currently based in Buckinghamshire and her works have been shown and collected by various private national and international collections. www.helensimms.co.uk

Tori Tipton is a contemporary British artist who utilises natural materials to create textural works of art, fostering a visceral connection to the natural world. Employing a palette of raw pigments and foraged materials, her abstract compositions aim to transcend conventional boundaries between art and the landscape.

By incorporating elements sourced directly from her surroundings – in the countryside, where she has carefully collected soil and clay to mix with binders – she seeks to collapse the perceived distance between humanity and nature. Natural materials such as earth, chalk, and charcoal, combined with such traditional artist’s mediums, serve as a visual representation of the intricate relationship between humanity and the environment.

Tipton has exhibited in many galleries and her paintings are part of private collections across the world. www.toritipton.com