Gwen Hollingsworth

Walking in Circles in the Night reimagines gardens and landscapes as sacred sites, using abstraction to create psychological realms seeking sanctuary and self-knowing. In recent years, Hollingsworth has developed a process of psycho-geographic world-building, producing ethereal scenes populated with floral silhouettes, claw-like gestures, and oscillating color relationships. These paintings function as ‘inner landscapes’, a term borrowed from Yuan Dynasty painters, who depicted hazy, contemplative nature scenes representing their fantasies and philosophies. These inner landscapes are settings processing various internalized insights, among them Hollingswoth's Chinese descent, feminine cosmological tropes and rituals, and broader views on regeneration, decay, and other inescapable natural phenomena. Each work here begins with a dark underpainting, followed by sharpening contours and thin build-up of successive layers, coming into focus as abstract fields and dimly-lit nocturnal scenes. Atmospheric hazes and vaporous landscapes emerge, as if remembered over time, lending the work a psychological essence, a sense of becoming intrinsic to the landscape.