Amanda Wallwork
13th October - 30th November, 2007

The paths that inspire and traverse this new collection of paintings refer to the ancient ways that crisscross the Land's End peninsula. The oldest of these ancient tracks is known today as Tinner's Way or the Old St Ives Road. They were the routes once taken by miners and workers with their precious cargo ­ stone axe heads in Neolithic times, tin and copper from the Bronze and Iron Ages onwards - mined from the wild coastal region around Cape Cornwall to the relatively sheltered shipping points of St Ives and Mount's Bay. Following the granite high ground of the peninsula, the routes are lined by the remains of prehistoric settlements, as well as relics of the Victorian mining boom.

Amanda Wallwork's paintings reveal the hidden and lost elements of landscape - pathways, enclosures, barrows, henges - submerged through erosion, reshaping and time. Her imagery is a form of historical mapping. It reminds us of how the landscape once was and that, in time, the present landscape too will change. The illusion of time and erosion is managed through using a restricted palette, based on the colours of the raw rocky landscape and the mineral deposits in the earth, and by the unevenness of the plaster blocks on which she makes the marks, with their pitted and scratched surfaces.