Alchemies of Place

‘The processes of my practice – the building up, scraping away and chipping of material – connect me to the landscape in ways beyond depiction. Heavy concoctions of viscous paint, combined with chalk, marble dust or plaster, echo geological forms which dissolve into foliage, water or sand. The work does not attempt to describe Cornwall; rather, it is formed through it, shaped by the textural variety and changeable conditions that define this particular sense of place.’

– May Cockcroft 

May Cockcroft’s paintings occupy a compelling space between abstraction and landscape. At first glance, they may appear wholly non-representational: fields of shifting colour, layered surfaces, ridges and deposits. Yet these artworks are profoundly connected to place. They emerge from a sustained engagement with Cornwall, not as a source of picturesque motifs, but as a landscape of energies and transformations. In her studio, Cockcroft enacts comparable processes, repeatedly transforming and reworking material to bring it into new states.

Cockcroft was born and raised in Cornwall, but it is since moving away, first to Edinburgh and then London, that the region has become an increasingly significant point of reference in her work. Now remembered at a distance, it appears not as a fixed topographical location but as a shifting constellation of forces, textures, colours and sensations. The works do not depict Cornwall directly, and Cockcroft never paints outdoors. Instead, they evoke something of its essential character: a landscape in perpetual flux.

Few places are more vividly mutable than Cornwall. Along its coastline, land and sea exist in a continual state of negotiation. Tides advance and recede; beaches are reconfigured by storms; shingle and sand are redistributed by currents; rugged cliffs are gradually eroded or suddenly reshaped by rockfall. Even for the most dedicated cartographer, the precise contours of the shoreline can never be fixed. The coast exists as a zone of encounter, where different materials and forces collide and interact.

 Situated at the south-western extremity of Britain, Cornwall is exposed to the full force of Atlantic weather systems. Sea becomes cloud, mist, rain and spray. Weather sweeps rapidly across the landscape, alternately obscuring and revealing it. Horizons blur, boundaries become indistinct, distances dissolve in moisture. These atmospheric changes find echoes in Cockcroft’s paintings, where translucent washes, opaque passages and shifting surfaces seem simultaneously to emerge and disappear.

Cornwall has an unusually visible geology, where granite outcrops and slate deposits bear witness to the forces of formation, compression, weathering and erosion that have unfolded over immense spans of geological time. For centuries, these natural resources have also been worked by human hands. The area’s history is inseparable from tin and copper mining, granite and slate quarrying, and the extraction of china clay. The landscape around Penryn, close to the artist’s childhood home, is marked both by abandoned quarries, their deep excavations now filled with water, and active working sites. Growing up within earshot of controlled blasts at Chywoon Quarry, Cockcroft encountered the transformation of raw materials at close range, as a visible and audible reality.

This Cornish legacy has carried into her studio practice. Cockcroft creates her own charcoal from the woodland around her family home and often selects colours associated with the local landscape: the earthy, warm tones of oxidised tin and copper; the cooler blues of granite and slate; the botanical greens of terre verte. Crucially, she transforms the conventional vocabulary of painting by combining traditional fine art materials with substances more commonly associated with construction: decorator’s caulk, plaster, chalk and marble dust. Rather than accepting the inherent properties of her materials, she mixes and modifies them, developing her own recipes to achieve particular effects.

The exhibition’s title, Alchemies, seems especially apt in this context. Historically, alchemy was concerned with the transformation of matter: the possibility that one substance might become another or reveal previously unseen potential. Cockcroft’s practice is similarly founded upon acts of material transmutation. Yet these processes evoke more than alchemical experimentation. The artist describes her working method as a condensed and simplified re-enactment of geological processes. Liquid substances harden into solid forms; materials disperse and settle; surfaces are scraped, abraded, washed and excavated, before further materials are applied. As each painting slowly accumulates through repeated cycles of reworking, processes analogous to sedimentation, weathering, accretion and erosion are compressed from geological timescales into weeks or months. The resulting paintings do not simply evoke the Cornish landscape; their very construction echoes the forces that have shaped it. 

This emphasis on process leaves visible traces within the finished works. Looking at them can feel akin to examining a geological formation, where successive strata retain evidence of previous events. Time becomes evident as material accumulation, while these layers also suggest the formation of memory, as remembered fragments of weather, colour, coastline and terrain are laid down within their surfaces. The central paradox of Cockcroft’s work is that the paintings are fixed objects, yet they are fundamentally concerned with change. They transform materials; they re-enact geological processes; they arise from landscapes in continual flux; they emerge from memories that shift and evolve over time.

Cornwall has long occupied a distinctive place in British art. From the Newlyn painters of the nineteenth century, drawn to the everyday lives of fishing communities and the qualities of Cornish light, to the artists of St Ives, for whom the landscape provided a catalyst for new forms of abstraction, successive generations have found inspiration at Britain’s south-western edge. Echoes of this heritage can be found in Cockcroft’s work. Light remains a vital presence, while affinities may be discerned with Peter Lanyon’s engagement with Cornish mining landscapes and his translation of lived experience into abstract form.

Yet Cockcroft ultimately moves beyond questions of influence or inheritance. Cornwall is essential to her practice not simply as subject matter, nor as a source of colour, light or abstract form, but as a model for thinking about transformation itself. Its weather, geology and coastline provide a language through which she explores the mutable nature of materials, places and perception. In this sense, Cornwall functions as her collaborator, providing the model of transformation that lies at the heart of Cockcroft’s practice.