2023 - 2025 EXHIBITION
Spirit of Place
8th November - 7th December 2025
Campden Gallery - High Street, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, GL55 6AG | E: info@campdengallery.co.uk | T: 01386 841 555
introduction by ian collins
It is a measure of Katherine Hamilton’s stature as a painter that, while we inhabit the same easterly edge of England, a quicksilver terrain slipping between landscape and seascape, her pictures always bring me fresh discoveries.
Not that, in life or art, she ever stays put for long. The traveller Freya Stark, on her last great journey, wanted only ‘to see beyond the next mountain’. Kate is just the same - a restless spirit crossing the garden, or the globe, in pursuit of arresting images.
Artists are ageless - perennially youthful - and Kate is still the dancer who set up a balletic troupe in Addis Ababa. There is a feeling of great poise and balance and physicality in every creative thing she tackles.
But just as a true work of art should retain a core of mystery, the travails of creation should never be visible. Like David Attenborough, Katherine Hamilton brings a far-flung and often inhospitable world to our living rooms as if by magic.
How wonderful to be able to enjoy such hard-won beauty in perfect comfort.
Waking before dawn on the banks of the Saramacca River a strange unfamiliar sound echoes from the surrounding forests, like thunder it triggers a sense of trepidation, the sound moves, growing closer and then recedes into the distance which both confuses and unsettles the listener. It is the call of the Howler Monkeys hidden and mysterious within this vast area of impenetrable forest. A place without humans, a refuge for the natural world.
Forests, valleys, gorges, forgotten places, I wander through often feeling like an intruder, not wanting to disturb but just listen and absorb, I make hasty notes in the attempt to capture what is around me.
There are no plans before a journey, just an arrival and departure date and an instinctive sense of direction. Whether across oceans or just a few miles up the road they are taken to renew one’s sense of wonder of the world.
These journeys are just the beginnings of trying to find a way of sharing what inspired me with the viewer, months and years of scraping off, starting again, throwing away and even then only a few will surface.
Katherine Hamilton
August 2025, Suffolk
