Burren College of Art Gallery, Co Clare 28th October – 26th November 2021.
For the past ten years, Cecilia Danell has returned to her family farm in Sweden to walk and gather research material for paintings. This experience of being in the landscape, along with the physical process of painting in the studio, results in works that detach themselves from the photographic source material. Danell began this body of work while on residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris in early 2020 and continued through the pandemic. The title ‘I Trust the Quiet’ was chosen to reflect a time of introspection and enforced solitude, where quietness has resulted in a focused engagement with painting, while the depicted winter landscape has come to represent that sense of stillness. The parallel reading of classic sci-fi and speculative fiction novels have also inspired this recent work, as what strikes her about these novels is humanity’s ability to persevere and adapt in adverse circumstances. The human urge to find solace in a primeval landscape grows increasingly stronger amidst the uncertainty of our current condition. Yet wilderness is for the most part a construct and the places she depicts are managed forest landscapes.
