Paintings which are not still, which breathe. That’s the work of Agnes Treherne in her show, With The Breathing of the Wind, at Anima Mundi St Ives.
Bass Rock, oil on birch panel, by Agnes Treherne
There is a kind of attention that does not fix the world in place, but allows for it to move — listening for rhythm, watching for the pulse of light, the turn of weather. Feeling for the soft shift of presence from one state to another. Agnes Treherne’s paintings arise from this broad attentiveness.
Drawing, for Treherne, is a way of being in the present. It is how she gathers up the world around her, as a kind of hearing carried out with the hand. Observation, part noticing, part feeling born from moments of encounter: prosaic, but charged; real, but transformed.
Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in her journal of 1802: “I never saw daffodils so beautiful, they looked as if they really enjoyed the wind that blew them.” This simple observation perhaps distills something of Treherne’s practice.
These works may begin in the everyday, but they do not stay bound to it. Through deduced and intuitive making, the image begins to shimmer with something more: memory, longing, and love. It is at this threshold, where attention deepens into emotion, that the work finds its magic.
With The Breathing of the Wind, by Agnes Treherne, is at Anima Mundi until 12th July.
Amina Mundi | Street-an-Pol, St Ives TR26 2DS | animamundigallery.com/
