Anna Hutton makes charcoal drawings exploring her deeply felt relationship with nature and the experience of living in a rewilded landscape. Her drawings of outgrown hedgerows, thickets and grasses, blurred towards abstraction on dull damp days, can take weeks or months to complete. She adds and removes pigment, and she smudges it as she makes tiny charcoal and erased marks. Eventually she finds a balance between the ground of the paper and her medium. Her drawings carry a sense of emergence and of a growing world. Currently she is experimenting with mezzotint to develop similar effects.

Persistence and Fragility of Nature

Anna Hutton’s work is concerned with the persistence and fragility of nature and the reassurance and unease that comes from our interaction with it.

More about Anna Hutton

Anna Hutton was born in Edinburgh in 1972. Disillusioned with BA Painting (Gray’s School of Art Aberdeen), she left to study MA History of Art (Edinburgh University) and MA Museology (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia). She went on to work with art and artists in museums and galleries and then as a gardener and designer after gaining the Royal Horticultural Society General Certificate in Horticulture.

Moving to the West Norfolk countryside with her young family in 2010, Anna’s engagement with the uniquely wild landscape of woodland, scrub, rare habitats and water meadows around her home led her to return to her artistic practice. She has fostered an interest in nature restoration, informed by the writing of Oliver Rackham, Roger Deakin, George Monbiot and Isabella Tree. Her drawings have been shown in group exhibitions in the UK and are held in private collections.