Marie-Claire Hamon & Melanie Miller: On The Way to the Well
On The Way to the Well, taking its title from the paths that lead to holy wells of Madron and Sancreed near Penzance.
The works reflect their respective responses to landscape, ritual, and the unseen stories embedded in place.
MARIE-CLAIRE HAMON
Marie-Claire’s paintings blend European surrealism, abstraction, and fauvism with the legacy of modernist artists who have worked in Cornwall. Her studio, nestled behind Trengwainton Gardens and between the holy wells of Sancreed and Madron, informs her practice through walking and close observation of the moors and local woodland. The shrines, prayers, and ancient granite monuments of the area appear in her work as layered symbols of memory and devotion, while her carefully developed colour palette undergoes repeated layering to achieve intensity and depth.
“The memory of shrines appears in my paintings like little idols of devotional desire; they are part of my history, of my layers and my landscape,” says Hamon.
MELANIE MILLER
Melanie works in oil on traditional gesso panels that she prepares herself. Her paintings emerge from a dialogue between observation, imagination, and the natural world. Drawing on myth, memory, found objects, and the endurance of objects, she considers the relationships between organisms, their surroundings, and the unseen spiritual forces within nature. Her Hedgerow paintings explore the boundaries between cultivation and wildness, control and the unknown, reflecting on the intricate systems of the natural environment.
“I consider myself in nature, the relationship between organisms and surroundings, the unseen, the spiritual, the unknown and the familiar,” explains Miller.
On The Way to the Well is showing in the Lower Gallery, Newlyn Art Gallery
All works are for sale with selected works available from our online shop.
