Matter and Light

Forthcoming exhibition May 2026
Over time, my practice has become less tethered to recognisable motifs or specific geographies, orienting instead toward a field of perceptual encounters. While traces of place remain, a glint of light on the edge of something, these fragments accumulate within the painting itself. Drawn from recollection as much as observation, each work registers the slow erosion of detail, the slippage between the remembered and the imagined. What endures is a sense of form in flux: an element emerging and dissolving, held in suspension between material and image.

Without stable perspective or fixed horizon, the paintings in Matter and Light occupy a mutable ground. Forms drift and coalesce, pigment eddies into indistinct constellations, and the surface seems perpetually to reconfigure itself. From a distance, one might sense a curvature or shadowed fold, but any certainty evaporates on approach. The eye moves between density and near-transparency, as if perception itself were shifting and provisional.

The title Matter and Light speaks both to material process and an underlying state of becoming. Paint is treated not as description but as substance: layered, dragged, scored, or thinned until its physicality assumes precedence. Each surface records its making, an index of energy, resistance, and touch. In this sense, the paintings are not depictions of the natural world but parallel, elemental terrains, crystallising forces and instabilities.

Light and colour act as shifting agents within this mutable field, transforming mass and space into perceptual events. The paintings move from darkness into illumination, as if form were coaxed from obscurity. Areas of shadow blur and dissolve, while flashes of brightness articulate the weight and contour of things half-seen. Colour is both substance and atmosphere, dense in some regions, thinned to a spectral haze in others, producing intervals where the surface seems to breathe. These modulations create the sensation of a space continually reforming: masses that verge on solidity only to dissolve into light.

In the Aurora Borealis series, I extend these ideas, using vertical flows of coloured pigment to make the painting itself luminous. Inspired by auroral light, caused by charged particles interacting with the upper atmosphere, these works trace shifting arcs of colour across the surface. Layering and modulation replicate the movement and instability of the phenomenon, allowing the viewer to register its constant shift as both a spatial and perceptual experience. The pigment becomes light, the surface becomes event, and the painting becomes an experience of perception.

In this way, Matter and Light becomes an inquiry into transformation: how substance shifts, how memory settles, and how painting holds traces of what is unstable or impermanent. Each work proposes a process rather than a depiction, a mutable, unresolved field where material and perception converge.

Ghost Acres, 2022

Developed through a collaboration between Alison Dalwood and Dr Keith G Davies FLS FRSB, Associate Professor and Applied Nematologist, School of Life and Medical Sciences, University of Hertfordshire.

The term “ghost acreage”, first introduced by ecologist Georg Borgström, describes the displaced consumption of land and resources on which Western societies depend. Ghost Acres explores this idea of unseen lands, consumed and depleted yet largely invisible and the tension between visibility and invisibility in our perception of the environment.

Each coloured panel in the work represents an estimate of the land area on which a single Western urban dweller relies: cropland, pastureland, other land, and woodland. The urban dweller is symbolised by a miniature light bulb. The panels chart the statistical acreage of these categories, visualising the scale of external land use required to sustain urban life.

This project extends into current work that considers endangered and outsourced resources, reflecting ongoing global dependencies. Ghost Acres translates an ecological concept into the language of painting, using layered oil glazes and processes of addition and erasure to evoke transformation, growth, and decay.

The paintings investigate how colour, surface, and material process can suggest a sense of horizon and depth while remaining fundamentally two-dimensional. The concept behind the series is of a landscape that can be imagined but not directly seen, on which we nonetheless depend.

Four locations are represented, each corresponding to one category of land use. The paintings refer to environmental qualities: light, shadow, and transition from day to night, rather than depicting them literally. The tonal shift from left to right suggests fading light, culminating in the blue twilight of Other Land, where a small illuminated bulb signifies the urban dweller.

The collaboration with Dr Davies arose from conversations about art, ecology, and the language of “ghost acres,” a term used in both scientific and philosophical contexts to describe the hidden spatial footprint of modern urban life. This work aims to make that concept tangible and visible, prompting reflection on the extent to which city dwellers depend on unseen landscapes and distant ecologies.

Link to exhibition: Ghost Acres

Alison Dalwood, 2022