F I E L D S T U D I E S
Camilla Ridgers presents Field Studies (2026), a new series of oil and oil pastel paintings on linen that marks an intentional reorientation in her practice. Comprising intimate linen-board studies alongside new large-scale works, the series sets aside generative systems in favour of direct observation, physical gesture and the unpredictable intelligence of paint.
Flowers and organic matter remain at the root of the work, but they are no longer treated as fixed or fully describable subjects. Observed forms loosen into fragments, lines and shifting fields of colour. Petals become bodily or architectural; stems become gestures; recognisable forms appear only to collapse and reassemble. Moving between figuration and abstraction, the paintings preserve the sensation of looking without resolving what is seen.
Field Studies develops Ridgers’ ongoing investigation into how images are produced, mediated and assigned meaning. Her formative research, Decoding Creativity: How Do We Critically Engage with Artworks Made by Machines?, examined the changing relationship between human and machine authorship and the transfer of creative agency within generative systems. Here, that inquiry is turned back towards the body. Rather than asking how an algorithm interprets an image, Ridgers considers how the eye, hand and material continually misread and transform the visible world.
The series also extends the concerns of Flora in Flux, Ridgers’ Homiens Art Prize-winning body of work examining the flower as both organic subject and cultural commodity. In Flora in Flux, chemically preserved flowers became symbols of a contemporary desire to stabilise, perfect and circulate nature, even at the expense of its authenticity. Field Studies returns floral matter to a state of movement and uncertainty. Beauty is no longer preserved or perfected, but allowed to remain unstable, unresolved and in flux.
“After years of painting in a more traditional and controlled way, I wanted to see what would happen if I loosened my grip,” says Ridgers. “Field Studies began as a return to looking, to flowers, organic matter and the physical intelligence of the hand. The paintings are less interested in recording a subject than in following what that subject sets in motion.”
Areas of exposed linen sit alongside sweeping passages of oil, oil pastel and abrupt linear marks. The works retain evidence of hesitation, revision and speed, allowing the process of their construction to remain visible. What initially appears spontaneous is grounded in sustained observation: an exchange between discipline and release.
Field Studies is therefore not a rejection of technology, but a recalibration of authorship. By returning creative agency to the eye, hand and body, Ridgers proposes painting as a form of thinking in real time: a space in which observation, memory and material act upon one another. Nature is neither captured nor perfected, but encountered as something active, unstable and continually becoming.