Hebrides-­based artist Pippa Gatty will present a new body of work in her first solo exhibition at Arusha Gallery in Edinburgh this spring.

Gatty’s work is rooted in the language and history of painting, and the discourse between that and her natural environment, the wildness and isolation of her island home on edge of the North Atlantic.

Her paintings are generally dark and small in scale, hovering on the edge of abstraction. These rich microcosms document her experience of her environment, her sense of wonder and foreboding, and reflect a nostalgia for the promises of the Arcadian tradition, one of man in harmony with nature. A human or animal presence is often suggested but seldom depicted, although a consciousness and a primordial feature of things are always sensed.