“Landscape,” says Gloucestershire artist Deborah Cox, “has long been treated as a kind of English romantic idyll.” Her paintings push back—quietly, insistently—against that veneer. “I’m interested in what isn’t visible in rural life: the cruelty, the suffering, rural poverty, and the histories of land-owning and colonisation—Gloucestershire certainly played its part.”
Her new exhibition, Landscape in Our Midst, opens this autumn at Aleph Contemporary, Stroud, and forms part of the Autumn Arts Trail open studio weekends (18–19 and 25–26 October 2025). Cox adheres to the conventions of landscape only “to subvert them,” inviting us to look past the picturesque to what’s really at stake in the land we walk through every day.
Seen / Unseen
Cox’s recent focus on the Wye Valley embodies this dual vision. “I’m concerned about the state of factory farming,” she explains. “Despite the lovely name, places like Cherry Tree Farm are actually intensive poultry farms—the name is part of the way the public are duped.” Her recent canvases, informed by Google Earth views, transform repeated geometries into patterns that read as both beautiful and brutal.
“I’ve never really touched abstraction much—it’s quite exciting,” she says, pointing to Richard Diebenkorn’s aerial translations of landscape into shape and pattern. Her aerial perspectives echo the secrecy of intensive farming in the US, where “so-called ag-gag laws” prevent aerial photography: “When they do take photographs, it looks like this.”
Practice / Process
Her practice is rooted in Gloucestershire’s fields and lanes. “I sit in the car—use the car as a studio—and paint in a field, but I also take photographs and work from the experience back in the studio.” Acrylics, pastels, and collage dominate her process; she often reworks her own archive of prints, layering fragments of memory into new compositions. “I start hoping there’ll be a dialogue that isn’t about me—that the work takes on a life of its own.”
Influences / Reading
Cox situates her work within a broad lineage: Ivon Hitchens, David Prentice, John Piper’s post-war ruins, Turner’s radical skies. “You wouldn’t believe how contemporary Turner is,” she insists.
Her reading seatbelts those influences to today’s environmental crises. She is currently immersed in Robert Macfarlane’s A River Alive, which traces threatened waterways from Ecuador to India to Quebec’s Magpie River—echoing the local challenges of Gloucestershire’s rivers. “It’s very much in keeping with what’s going on with the Wye,” she reflects.
Audience / Exchange
Public response confirms the urgency of Cox’s practice. “I was amazed how involved people were with the Wye Valley pieces,” she recalls. “They started real conversations.” For her, art’s role is simple: “Yes, it can help people connect more deeply with their environment.”
This October, Landscape in Our Midst will be on view at Aleph Contemporary, Stroud, and during the Autumn Arts Trail open studio weekends (18–19 and 25–26 October 2025)—a chance to see Deborah Cox’s newest work in dialogue with Gloucestershire’s landscapes: seen, unseen, and yet, urgently present.
