News — contemporary art

We are delighted to present new work by multi-award-winning artist Patricia Paolozzi Cain. Based in rural Dumfries and Galloway, Patricia Paolozzi Cain's often large-scale works of art form an active and shaping force that exists between the artist and her physical environment. Tangled tree branches, dense hedgerows, a fusion of fallen leaves, sedges and thickets are the preamble to Paolozzi Cain's abstracted compositions. Getting lost in nature's cosmos is for Paolozzi Cain a means to look inward, to introspect. In her own words, she says, "I focus on nature as a gateway to the internal mind." Using a process of intense scrutiny, where she transposes and edits what she sees before her, Paolozzi Cain turns observations into a rich, meditative language that is as much rooted in place as it is in consciousness.

For Benjamin West, collage is about making a statement. Like the Dadaists who pioneered collage as a medium to socially and politically provoke, Benjamin uses his practice to raise questions about the human impact on the environment. Juxtaposing fragments from botanical reference books with images of machinery, motorways and factories, Benjamin brings into plain sight the ugliness of urban expansion, land conversion and loss of habitat.

Like falling down a rabbit hole, Stewart Swan takes us on a journey that burrows deep into a mysterious world full of obscure histories, mythology and age-old phenomena. His chosen subjects, some of them from history, others from legend, tell stories of the intangible, capturing our imagination and arousing our curiosity.

Set against the landscape of today, Sarah Randles's visual language captures the stereotypes and social norms that still exist today. Choosing collage or photo-montage as her primary discipline, Sarah appropriates imagery from throughout history to make a spectacle of these arbitrary ideas, and by doing so, offers a new space for understanding and reimagining.

Eager to learn more about her weird and wonderful compositions, we invited Sarah to partake in a virtual interview. Here's how it went.