For Xanthe Burdett, the boundary between humans and nature is thin, malleable, and always in flux. The Devon-born, London-based artist works largely in a palette of greens, layering leaves and vines atop faint figurative silhouettes. Invoking mythology and ancient cosmologies, her paintings suggest that people and plants are not only interconnected but also intrinsically one.
Beginning with a sketch, Burdett employs the Renaissance-era cartoon method of transferring her drawings to canvas, which involves layering a substance like charcoal between the preparatory composition and the substrate and tracing the initial linework. After, the artist adds various greenery until she’s reached a lush density.
Burdett considers superimposition to be a way of “reimagining the body as a site of ecological and mythic transformation,” she says. “In an age defined by environmental catastrophe—wildfires, biodiversity loss, and climate anxiety—the work functions both as a refuge and as a space for imagining alternative ways of being with the more-than-human world.”
Presented as “host and terrain,” Burdett’s figures encompass a sense of growth and regeneration as “flesh gives way to nettles, brambles, and tender green shoots,” she adds. Many also invoke mythic deities, including Venus, the Roman god of beauty and fertility, and Janus, the god of transitions and beginnings.
This fall, the artist will be in residence at Soho Revue working on a collection exploring the Greek tale of Daphne, who morphed into a laurel tree, as a way to conceptualize transformation amid climate catastrophe. Keep up with that new series on Instagram.
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