Imogen Allen b. 1997

Imogen Allen is a painter whose work explores the energetic terrain of our conscious and subconscious experience through the physical language of colour, shape and gesture. Her paintings are luminous, meditative portals of reflection, which embrace the physicality of our earth as a pathway to the spiritual, transcendental experience.

Allen’s upbringing in Zennor, South West Cornwall has had a profound impact on her practice, which draws directly upon familiar moorland replete with lichen, standing stones and ethereal grasses. Natural forms are both an anchor and lens to explore the ineffable: her subjects waver in and out of focus, as do the distinctions between land, its organisms and the human body. A piece of fungi resembles an ear and a form of lichen mirrors both an island or an eye. Material properties of our natural surroundings are therefore empowered with anthropomorphic voices, finding sensuous expression in vivid colour and shifting depth.

Allen’s paintings implore the viewer to reflect upon their phenomenological experience of the natural world, with an emphasis on feeling, rather than narrative or representation. Her luminous subjects transmute and come into being, drawing a parallel between the terrain of painting itself and the growth of lichen. In a web of reciprocity between organisms, we are called upon to respond to our surroundings, as they respond to us.