Ambiguous Nature

An Exhibition of Paintings by Orlanda Broom

Press Release

Ambiguous Nature presents a selection of recent landscape and abstract paintings by contemporary British artist Orlanda Broom.

Formerly based in London and now working from Hampshire, Broom is known for creating large-scale paintings using layered mixed media and resin. Her compositions combine vivid colour, organic forms and highly polished surfaces to produce immersive, dreamlike environments that appear both seductive and unsettling.

The landscapes featured in Ambiguous Nature unfold through kaleidoscopic arrangements of colour and form. Saturated pigments, translucent layers and glossy resin surfaces create an all-encompassing visual experience. The paintings seem to draw the viewer into imagined worlds in which natural forms have become intensified, distorted and transformed.

Beneath their immediate beauty, however, the works explore the uncertainty surrounding the future of the natural environment during a period of accelerating climate change. Dark, glowing landscapes are displayed alongside luminous and seemingly serene compositions. Metallic purples, petrol-like blacks and fiery crimsons evoke the atmosphere of science-fiction or post-apocalyptic worlds, while more exotic and exuberant scenes initially appear playful, enticing and almost irresistible.

On closer inspection, signs of unease begin to emerge. Strange formations, murky passages and unnatural colour combinations suggest that these environments may be undergoing a process of transformation or decline. Their beauty is inseparable from a sense of toxicity and instability: they are, in every sense, ambiguous in nature.

The power of Broom’s paintings also lies in their ability to stimulate experiences that extend beyond sight. Their rhythm, colour and movement suggest a form of synaesthesia—an overlapping of the senses in which colour might be heard, shapes tasted or visual forms experienced as sound.

Artists including Wassily Kandinsky explored similar relationships between colour, form and music during the early twentieth century. In Broom’s work, abstracted natural forms, brilliant pigments and reflective resin surfaces encourage equally heightened sensory responses. Colours appear almost fragrant, while shapes seem to surge, stretch and resonate across the canvas. Although her paintings possess a powerful and immediate visual language, each viewer is invited to experience them in a uniquely personal way.

Reflecting on her landscape paintings, Orlanda Broom explains:

“My paintings are lush, colourful landscapes that exist as part of a fantastical, reimagined world. I apply a hyper-saturated view of each landscape and, with no references to human or animal existence, these places could predict our planet’s future or hark back to its evolution.

“The initial joyousness—the lure of beauty and colour—is tempered by an uneasy sense of abandonment. There is a toxicity implied in the palette and strange formations. I use resin, which has a glass-like finish and echoes the sappy excretions that the plants might produce. There is a dichotomy between wanting to explore such a place and the inevitable entrapment should you find yourself there.

“The themes in my current body of work are both bleak in outlook and celebratory in nature. The inertia towards environmental destruction seems inevitable, but with that doom-heavy prediction comes a belief—or hope—that nature will prevail, take the planet back to square one and begin again.”

The exhibition also includes a selection of Broom’s abstract paintings. These works maintain subtle connections to her landscapes through recurring organic shapes, floral references and arrangements of colour and form. Freed from the suggestion of a specific environment, they offer a more immediate and purely sensory encounter with abstraction.

Describing the difference between the two bodies of work, Broom says:

“This is a very different process of working. It is much more immediate and quite different from working on my landscapes, which are made using a more traditional approach with brushes, building up a layered and defined composition.”

Orlanda Broom has exhibited regularly in London and internationally since completing her MA in 1997. Her paintings have been selected for prominent exhibitions and competitions, including the Threadneedle Prize, the National Open Art Competition, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the John Moores Painting Prize, for which she was longlisted in 2018.

As a self-represented artist, she has exhibited by invitation at Messums Wiltshire, Mehta Bell Projects, Long & Ryle and James Freeman Gallery, as well as at galleries in Cape Town, Portugal and Paris. Her work is regularly commissioned, and she has created a number of large-scale paintings for public and commercial spaces.