Anna Hutton

Anna Hutton makes tonal charcoal drawings of the rewilded landscape that surrounds her home in rural Norfolk. She walks there alone following the same paths repeatedly through changing seasons, weather and light. She observes nature closely, paying attention to the shifting shapes and shadows. Some views are quite open over the chalky ridges of ice age pingos with blackthorn, hawthorn, brambles and sallow growing in small groups forming mounds within the landscape. Other views of scrubland are denser and the structures feel more imposing. She is fascinated by the effect of mist and damp air in blurring a scene towards abstraction and her work hovers in this liminal space. Her drawing process is lengthy and meditative - adding, removing, smudging, and making tiny charcoal and erased dots until a balance is found between the ground of the paper and her medium. Her necessary engagement with a particular place also includes that place that is the paper as a landscape that is continually emerging and calling on her intervention. Marks become ghost-like and are replaced by new marks as she works over and over the delicate surface echoing, through this process, the impermanence of her landscape - the subtle effects of time passing, the fluctuating light, and the gradual process of loss and renewal.

Anna was born in Edinburgh in 1972. She lives and works in Norfolk, UK.