The paintings I have made for this exhibition could be described as embodying inherited memories. My mother and my aunts and uncles often talked about the farm they grew up on. As a child these richly woven descriptions created a place I would visit in my imagination, one full of wildflowers, tall grasses, narrow lanes and a farm road that my mother described walking in all weathers to and from the house they grew up in.

The fields in my paintings are often left fallow and we find our own path through the land sometimes toward a house in the distance. The places I remember and the places I absorbed as stories have become one, forming a landscape of the imagination, a tapestry of fragmented, collected memories, like an unfinished painting waiting to be completed. Some parts of this tapestry of memories still exist like Skateraw, on the east coast where my uncle was once a grieve. I can go there to paint or draw and if I can’t it’s only a short walk through this imagined space. Other parts are long gone and remain locked inside a landscape of memory that I reconstruct in painting whenever my mind turns back down the road that leads there.'

John McClenaghen, 2026