‘Materia Metaphysica’ by Fiona Owen
Saturday 8 June to Sunday 14 July 2024
Fiona Owen has been a professional artist for more than 45 years. Her fascination has always been with the natural world, plants being her foremost passion. She has always grown most of the plants that she paints.
For 35 years, Fiona lived with her artist husband in an old chapel on the side of a steep, south-facing valley in one of the Stroud’s five valleys, at Chalford, where they held an annual studio exhibition and opened their garden.
Recently, they moved to South West Cornwall, near their daughter and her young family and they are creating a new sea-facing organic no-dig garden there.
Fiona paints in oil on gessoed panel, gilding her illuminations with Italian goldleaf in the tradition of the medieval monks’ manuscripts, which was her specialist student study.
Her gilded panels are an honouring of Nature, woven with layers of alchemical symbolism and sacred geometry. Each piece is created with the focused intention of invoking the ancient and healing Green Magic of the Land.
This exhibition is the culmination of a decade of herbal studies and a continuation of the ‘Weeds in the Heart’ project Fiona has been working on with Stroud-based herbalist Nathaniel Hughes. They have published two books together and the body of work in this exhibition will form part of the new ‘Wild Enchantment’ set of divination cards with accompanying book.
She has developed her life-long fascination with drawing and painting plants into sealed cabinets of Plant Spirit Medicine, displaying each plant’s material form and medicine as well as gilded panels of their associated flora and fauna framed with an individual invocation to the healing spirit of each plant.
