Ashley Hanson and Sara Bor’s two-person show ‘Duality’ presents two contrasting approaches to landscape painting. The combination of the two not only provides a rich visual experience, but accentuates each style, much like when blue is placed against orange, each colour becomes more vibrant.  

Both artist’s approach to and interest in the landscape differ. Sara Bor is concerned with natural pigments, geology, memory, and personal connection to place, whereas Ashley Hanson is driven by colour, working Cornish ports, and creating imagined landscapes from novels.  

Bor’s work is concerned with her connection to place. In this exhibition, she explores her relationship to the highlands of Scotland and to the mine-marked landscape of West Penwith. Her work begins in the earth. Bor will draw in and with the landscape, using the natural pigments she finds to lay down marks. This excavation reveals the lands history: industry, erosion, re-growth, and man-made intervention are revealed. These discoveries are composted down with Bor’s own personal relationship to the place, her memories mixed in with the land’s own remembrances.  

If the process begins in excavation, it continues in construction. She takes her initial sketches, along with collections of natural pigments, back to the studio where she will begin to layer. Bor experiments with combining materials such as copper oxide, iron filings, pigment, and foraged bits of landscape. These are layered on, reacting with each other in surprising ways. The alchemy of material on canvas becomes a metaphor for how industrial intervention transforms a landscape.  

With Bor’s West Penwith series, she has been exploring the effects of the mining industry on both the landscape and the collective consciousness: the creation of economy, the collapse of industry, the changes to lives. She explores how its decay has left physical marks on the landscape. The crumbling mines of West Penwith become beautiful shadows of this history, writing it into the landscape. This is Bor’s concern: understanding a place’s story, her part of that story, and the new developing narrative of the canvas.