Transient Landscapes, Cévennes

Series 2010-2012 

"Laura Hudson's exceptional use of colour and form throw us all back to the first innovators in modernist painting looking with new eyes at the French mountainous hinterland'. Alan Fynn South West Academy of Art and Craft

I spent 9 years living on a farm in the Cévennes mountains, France, where I grew edible plants for food and seed. Working on the same piece of land taught me to notice the cycles, conflicts and symbiosis of the natural world.  

While in France I tried to capture the feeling and energy of the land with a camera but all a camera can do is record an instant in time, a misrepresentation of the living thing.  By painting I found I could observe the effects of light on land as it changed each day and through the seasons. During the days, weeks or months a painting might take I watched the land and the light change. Sometimes I was able to distil that time into a single painting, one day folding over the next. Some paintings, once started, might have to wait until conditions repeated the next day or a full year later.

In the natural world what is visible shifts moment-to-moment but that reality has taken billions of years to evolve.