Biography / Artist Statement
Drawn to wind and weather, Geraldine van Heemstra connects to the changing landscape through walking and full immersion in the Scottish Hills and along the coastline. The elements and landscape flow through her, onto paper and into her art, transforming the intangible into the tangible. Her marks are developed in collaboration with nature and expressed predominantly, but not exclusively, in painting and printmaking.
“The practice of walking reconnects me with the infinite natural world. In the shadowland where thinking stops and feeling begins, I work with devices created with found objects from the land, recording elemental intangibility, and becoming a conduit for the unseen. My work is a translation of my interaction with the natural world.”
“Living all the way through: to touching, tasting, smelling and hearing the world. If you manage this, then you might walk ‘out of the body and into the mountain’, such that you become, briefly, ‘a stone…the soil of the earth” - Nan Shepherd
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2016 Watercolours of the Isle of Skye, Single Track Art Gallery, Isle of Skye
2016 Musical Lines, The Yehudi Menuhin School, Stoke d’Abernon
2016 Musical Lines, A&D Gallery, 51 Chiltern Street, London
2015 The Spirit of Skye, The Studio, 73 Glebe Place, London
2015 Painting from a rooftop, Dutch Church, 7 Austin Friars, City of London
2013 Exhibition of recent work, Dutch Church, 7 Austin Friars, City of London
2010 En Plein Air, The Studio, 73 Glebe Place, London
2005 A Gift from Skye, Dundas Gallery, Edinburgh
Selected Group Shows
2018-23 Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, London
2023 Changing Landscapes, Wilderness Art Collective, Nine Elms Gallery, London
2022 Exposure, Pollen Collective, Shepherds Bush Market, London
2022 Reverb, Visual Arts Scotland, Edinburgh
2021 Tracing Earth, PaintSpaces Gallery, London
2021 Salon Exhibition, Randle White Art, London
2021 Circle, Pollen Collective, 44 Great Russel Street, London WC1B 3JL
2021 Wonderland, Collaborative Project with Singer-Songwriter Kate Ellis for COP26
2021 Materials & Process, Canning Gallery, London E16 1EB
2020 Wilderness for the Mind, on-line exhibition with the Wilderness Art Collective
2020 The Signature Art Prize (Finalist), Bankside Hotel, London
2019 Postgraduate Printmaking in London 2019 (Shortlisted), Clifford Chance, London
2019 Human, Platform 1 Gallery, Wandsworth Common Station, Platform 1
2019 Landlines, Selected works from the RGS exhibition, Morden Hall Park, London
2019 MA Show, City & Guilds of London Art School
2019 Landlines, Wilderness Art Collective, The Royal Geographical Society, London
2019 Extreme Imagination: Inside the minds’s eye. The Tramway, Glasgow
2019 Extreme Imagination, RAMM, Exeter (5 April – 2 June 2019). University of Exeter
2018 Imaginary Beings, Exhibition Recital with pianist Prach Boondiskulchok, London
2016 The BFG Dream Jar Trail, Barbican Centre
2015 Art Gives Life, Brains in Pictures, Duna Gallery, Katwijk aan Zee, the Netherlands
2014 Plein Air Painting, Duna Gallery, Katwijk aan Zee, The Netherlands
2013 In the Light of Walcheren, Marie Tak van Poortvliet Museum, The Netherlands
2012 Drawn to music,The Studio, 73 Glebe Place, London SW3 5JB
Awards
2024 Nancy Graham Memorial Book Award, VAS Centenary Exhibition, RSA Edinburgh 2021 Intaglio Printmakers Prize
2019 Postgraduate Printmaking in London 2019, (Shortlisted) Clifford Chance London
2020 The Signature Art Prize, (Finalist) Bankside Hotel, London
2019 The Norman Ackroyd Prize for etching