Having worked as a marine biologist prior to studying painting, Emma Hambly’s work is embedded in the natural environment with particular interests in light, photosynthesis and plants. In this body of work she considers the complexity of the earth in an effort to re-find an Eden in our time.

Regain’d

The title of the show, Regain’d, refers to John Milton’s poem, with its call for peaceful love and joyful determination to effect a constructive repair of the mistakes of the past, winning by creative conquest what man has lost by fallacy. Emma’s works are largely informed and inspired by the garden at Overbeck’s in Salcombe and the wilds of the surrounding coast.

Emma Hambly, Sharptor Gorse, pencil, 33x23cm (2)

Softening

Many of Emma’s photographs were taken on her mother’s old camera using aged rolls of film, and she says, “the softening of the film, as a result of temporal deterioration of the chemistry, works towards my thoughts on nostalgia and memory which they are about.”

Regain’d is at Harbour House in Kingsbridge from Tuesday 8 June to Sunday 13 June. Admission is free.

top image: Emma Hambly, Eden, box brownie photograph