Anna Hutton

Anna Hutton makes charcoal drawings exploring her deeply felt relationship with nature and the experience of living in a rewilded landscape. Her drawings of outgrown hedgerows, scrubland and trees blurred towards abstraction on dull damp days, can take weeks or months to complete. Pigment is added and removed and smudged as she makes tiny charcoal and erased marks until a balance is found between the ground of the paper and her medium. The drawings carry a sense of emergence and of a growing world. She is experimenting with mezzotint to develop similar effects. Her work is concerned with the persistence and fragility of nature and the reassurance and unease that comes from our interaction with it.

Moving to the West Norfolk countryside with her young family in 2010, Anna’s engagement with the uniquely wild landscape of woodland, scrub, rare habitats and water meadows around her home led her to return to her artistic practice and fostered an interest in natural regeneration, informed by the writing of Oliver Rackham, Roger Deakin, George Monbiot and Isabella Tree.

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