Pascale Cumberbatch is Meadow's Artist in Residence this summer. Drop in anytime from 5-9pm on Thursday 11 June for the preview, with drinks and nibbles to mark the occasion and a first look at her work.

Pascale Cumberbatch is British/French artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, photography and occasional printmaking. Her work is centred on themes of earthly beauty and daily life, using colours that resonate with emotion and conversing with the rich visual poetry of flowers.

Pascale draws and paints from memory or imagination, seeking to convey mood rather than accurate depiction. She uses simple lines and shapes to distill just the essence of the subjects; the feeling of a fruit bowl on a table, the exuberance of a bouquet, the melancholy of beauty past its prime, or anticipation of nature in bud. Her flowers are abstracted, whether dancing across the paper or sitting primly in a sturdy jug. She is drawn to the imperfect, the wilted bloom or cracked porcelain, exploring the transience and delicacy of life, transformation, decay and renewal. 

Pascale consciously depicts flowers, generally considered a feminine subject, as emblems of potency rather than fragility. Woven throughout her work is the female experience and her position of being a woman in the world; the flowers and pots, symbolic of femininity and the female body, represent womanhood and the particular story this tells.

Pascale has travelled, lived, studied and worked across many corners of the world, these experiences deeply influencing her work. She studied Anthropology as her first degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. She later studied Photography at University of the Arts, London, and completed an MA in Contemporary Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford in 2015. Alongside her practice based at Magdalen Road Studios in Oxford, Pascale regularly spends time and finds inspiration at her home in France.

”My work is filled with plants and flowers. In flowers I find beauty, fragility and strength, and a language that transcends time and place; they represent all aspects of life from resilience to spirituality, emotion to science.”