Føroyar, the latest solo exhibition of multi-scale paintings and drawings from environmental artist and mariner Sax Impey, has opened at Anima Mundi.
Impey’s practice is inseparable from direct encounter. Having sailed thousands of miles across some of the earth’s most challenging waters, his work is informed not by distant observation, but by ongoing immersion in the elemental.
The pieces gathered here emerge from a recent voyage to the remote Faroe Islands, while also drawing upon wider experiences of time spent at sea.
Here, the transient ocean meets with the geological, where rock is shaped and worn across slow time. Cliffs and mountains rise like ancient sentinels — immovable and enduring, yet our perception of this permanence remains fleeting, obscured and revealed by weather, mist and shifting light. This continual dissolving and reforming creates a dialogue between the momentary and the eternal.
In the studio, Impey translates these encounters into material form. His mark-making experiments with fluidity, pressure, and dissolution, carrying both the turbulence of weather and wave and the weight of rock and mass. Fluid washes veil incisive gestures; immediacy is held in balance with structural precision, in search of a language that might embody the elemental in its many states.
Føroyar becomes a meditation on duality, says the gallery — of intimacy and immensity, transience and endurance, fragility and strength. It is an invitation to enter into renewed dialogue with the natural world, to sense again a deep and humbling connectedness with it, and to recognise both the fleetingness of perception and the slower transformations of the earth that will outlast us.
The exhibition runs until 18th October.
Anima Mundi | Street-an-Pol, St Ives TR26 2DS | animamundigallery.com/
