HEATHER POCOCK

For her third exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery Heather Pocock ( born London 1954) has brought together paintings produced over some five years which have their origin in time the artist spent in two profoundly contrasting environments: on the Isle of Mull off the north west coast of Scotland and in Namibia in south west Africa. In both settings, in almost every extreme of climate, the artist has found fresh ways to pursue her overarching engagement with the elements of nature and our relationship with its increasingly fragile equilibrium. At the heart of her dense and richly textured compositions hover as always various species of the wildlife she untiringly stalks, whose habitats form her true subjects.

Exploring the Namib Desert, which stretches alongside the coast for some thirteen hundred kilometres from Angola to South Africa, Heather Pocock walked in the vast Sand Dune Sea of Sossusvlei, learning to recognise and track the region's wildlife. 'In so many places,' she comments, 'I could have been a hunter-gatherer.' The lively rock paintings of this desert's earliest inhabitants, the San Bushmen, form the subject of one of her works. It is the wildlife, however, with which she is primarily concerned. The tension of contact with her prey finds expression in small, densely worked paintings infused with a mood of lyrical expectancy, along with an alert watchfulness which mirrors the reflexes of her wary living subjects.

Further north and inland among the Naukluft Mountains, inhabited by the rare Hartmann's Zebra, or in the well-watered grasslands of the Etosha Pan (cheetah country) she has exercised to the full her ability, sometimes compared to that of Franz Marc, to convey animals essentially through an evocation of their natural habitat.

Such skills are no more clearly in evidence than when Heather Pocock finds her subjects by the sea, whether it be oyster catchers skimming the waves off the Atlantic coast near Swakopmund or back at her home base in Mull where she has lived for the better part of seventeen years. It may, indeed, be that in a palette of mid-winter, revealing harmonies of colour which give full rein to her predilection for browns and iridescent blues, with now and then a flecking of gold, she rises to her most lyrical heights with her paintings of snow cushioning high crags or flights of cormorants wheeling over rocks above a turbulent northern sea.

BIOGRAPHY

Heather Pocock was born in London in 1954 and educated at St. Albans College of Art and Sheffield College of Art, gaining a travel bursary to study in Italy, where she focused on the artists of the early Renaissance. She went on to take a postgraduate degree at the University of London. From 1978 onwards she has divided her time between painting, travelling and teaching, initially working as a fitness instructor at an outdoor adventure centre, an experience which has stood her in good stead in her later, demanding travels.

From 1986 she travelled for some three years continuously, first in India, then through Asia, down to Indonesia and on to Australia, New Zealand and finally the United States. Since that time she has continued to teach and travel during the summer months, spending the winters painting at her base on the western coast of Scotland. Heather Pocock has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1994. In 1997/1998 she participated in the Gallery's Saxon Shore project, first in Maddox Street, then in the exhibition's second public showing at the Arts Centre at King's Lynn, Norfolk, in Roma (2002) and in Lair of the leopard: twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily (2006). One-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1998, 2002 and 2008.

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