Rosie Phipps

Local artist Rosie Phipps has been painting for decades in privacy, creating dream like studies of flowers, landscapes and figures that paste imagination on to paper. After a hugely successful public debut exhibiting with the LiterArties collective and Oxfordshire Artweeks last year, Phipps’ long overdue solo show ‘One Fine Summer in the Cotswolds’ comes to The Jam Factory this January.

Made up of a large collection of charmingly small watercolour landscapes, the exhibition forms a gallery of windows gazing onto joyful, sunshine yellow fields beneath moody British skies. We’re invited to lose ourselves in a land of contrast: bright but clouded, loose but smooth. Reflecting on these works, Phipps describes them as “the pleasure of sitting in a field all day staring at the way the fields are shaped by the contours of the earth. And shaped again by the shadows of the clouds that tumble across the sky. Always changing. And always there giving one a sense of familiarity and stability. The Cotswold’s. So different from where I was brought up. The wild and endless landscape of the Transvaal in South Africa. No neat fields.”

Phipps’ process begins in disorder that develops into deep patterns. “Light creates the brushstrokes and the forms, I follow those”, she explains. “The landscape creates a small focus frame by frame of the land and helps one to temporarily ignore the world that exists beyond.” The Jam Factory reveals the rolling, contemplative landscapes of Rosie’s world from 15th January 2020.

Curated by Eleanor Monk