Light in the Darkness

Flooded Fields (Liz Kelleher).

THERE is something intrinsically moody and yet honestly beautiful at the same time in the evocative sky and landscape paintings of Lincolnshire artist Liz Kelleher.

If you are familiar with the county’s big, sometimes disconcerting, skies and giant panoramas of flat land stretching from horizon to horizon, you will know instinctively what I mean.

Much of Kelleher’s work is giant in physical size too, reflecting the enormity of the natural landscape and offering the viewer a sense of presence and immersion.

Her paintings can easily take up a wall or two of any regular sized home - but the size and commanding play of light and dark only serve to draw you into the landscape, as if somehow you are standing right within it.

I viewed a collection of her emotive paintings on display during a week-long solo exhibition at the small but highly regarded Carre Gallery in the Lincolnshire market town of Sleaford. It regularly supports new and local artists, often showcasing their first ever public exhibition.

Kelleher is no newcomer to art or indeed the Lincolnshire landscapes which she walks daily for solace and inspiration. In 2023 she gave up her 15-year role as art teacher at Spalding High School in favour of a wholehearted pursuit of her passion for painting.

But first, as a kind of demarcation line between the old and the new, she undertook a 300-mile solo pilgrimage, trekking from Iona on the Scottish west coast to Lindisfarne in Northumbria, a truly spiritual walk in every sense.

Kelleher describes it as a “life-changing” experience which challenged her physically, emotionally and spiritually.

She emerged with a fresh vision for the way forward, not to mention a stunning portrayal of the Holy Island and Lindisfarne seascape, 10 feet wide and 4 feet high, a diptych called simply ‘Outlook on Lindisfarne’.

Her exhibition at the Carre Galley was fittingly named ‘Light in the Darkness’, a title enshrined in the paintings themselves but also an acknowledgement of her strong Christian faith.

“As an artist my practise involves daily walking, predominantly in the agricultural plains of South Lincolnshire,” she explained. “This fuels my connection, curiosity and profound appreciation of the magnificent sky filled places I inhabit.”

Kelleher says her work encompasses a range of processes which include walking, collecting, drawing, printmaking, photography and writing, all of which often culminate in her trademark large-scale oil paintings.

“The ephemeral contrasting light, colour, atmosphere and spontaneous, fast-paced fluctuations in weather experienced in the open landscape, especially during dawn and dusk, are awe inspiring. Such beauty takes my breath away and I feel a deep sense of intimacy.”

Kelleher’s landscape walks are not only visual, fact-finding missions but provide time to reflect on life and to pray.

“In my paintings I seek to explore and express the emotional intensity and connection I feel in my walk with God, which is the foundation of all I do. I’m thankful for the ‘light’ I experience through Jesus in what can often be a very challenging and dark world.”

Yorkshire-born Kelleher, who lived and worked in Essex before moving to Lincolnshire, says she naturally finds herself drawn to abstract with more figurative works before creating a sense of structure out of chaos.

She is also Creative Director for the Old Hospital Trust and A&E collaborative, which seeks to transform communities through arts and well-being projects, as well as provide opportunities and spaces for creatives.

“I love being immersed in the landscape and harnessing its energy,” Keheller adds. “It is a continuous sense of discovery and I want people to feel involved in my paintings in the same way.”  

Artist Liz Kelleher at the Carre Gallery, Sleaford.

Carre Gallery was opened in 2010 as a result of collaboration between a local businessman and the late Windham Hime, a professional artist and photographer. It is now operated by the Sleaford Gallery Arts Trust, a registered charity, and everyone involved in the gallery’s operation and management is a volunteer.   

England’s forgotten county

Lincolnshire's wild North Sea coast at Sutton on Sea.                   Photo: Clive Simpson

 

England’s second-largest, yet least well-known, county comes under the literary spotlight in a new book full of evocative and often elegiac descriptions of landscape and wildlife, alongside fascinating reflections on the area's history, countryside and people, from prehistory right up to the present day.

 

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IN THE early 1960s my parents relocated from their birth town of Derby (it was only consigned city status in 1977 despite having always had its own cathedral) to start a new life in rural Lincolnshire, the second largest county in England.

I was therefore destined not to grow up in the peaks and valleys of Derbyshire but in the flat Fenlands surrounding the small market town of Spalding, renown at the time for its tulips, sugar beet and potatoes. It is where I attended secondary school and subsequently began my journalistic career on the local newspaper.

So, it is with residential impunity and a little insider knowledge, that I can assert with some authority that the county of Lincolnshire has always had something of a reputation as a political, economic and cultural backwater. By the same token, the propensity of its adult population - at least up to the present time - to vote conservatively in such large numbers was always a bit of a mystery to me.

In the referendum of 2016 it was not hard to predict therefore that such entrenched voting behaviour would culminate with a huge tranche of the county - and most notably the towns of Grimsby, Boston and Spalding - voting to deliver one of the country’s highest collective ‘anti-Europe’ votes.

But the sprawling county, with a surprisingly varied topography allied with an indistinct coastline that barely defines its boundary with the North Sea around The Wash, is so much more than the political summation of its largely ageing and traditional population.

All this, along with Lincolnshire’s unexpected role in defining significant eras of the nation’s history, is brought into sharp focus in the excellent new book ‘Edge of England - Landfall in Lincolnshire’ by Dublin-born novelist and poet Derek Turner. It’s publication by Hurst in the summer of 2022 was as impeccably timed as the content is revealing.

Unsurprisingly, the reader soon learns that after spending two decades exploring and reading about England’s “forgotten county” Turner is now a solid gold Lincolnshire “Yellowbelly” resident himself, keen to pay a long overdue homage to the land of big skies, mega agriculture and an ever-changing way of life.

While much of the book’s prosaic beauty lies in acute observations of time and place, noted in detail on every page via Turner’s poetic turn of phrase and language, the historic importance and influence of the county also comes as a revelation in itself.

Laying out his raison d’etre for his book in the introduction, Turner states that the “proverbial mentions” of Lincolnshire he found during his extensive research were all seemingly “disparaging”, showing the county as “decaying, boorishly rustic”, and even a target of “diabolical ire”.

When asked about Lincolnshire not many, he says, responded with a good word, while others seemed “nonplussed” even to be asked. “The mere word could almost be a conversation killer,” he writes. “Lincolnshire started to look like a continent apart - a large, and largely blank, space, almost islanded by cold sea, great estuaries, soggy wastes, and a filigree of fenny waterways.”

In the book’s opening, Turner defines the county as “an ill-defined, in-between transit zone lazily assumed to have no ‘must-see’ sights and little that was even interesting”. 

He goes on to say the county was “notable chiefly to agronomists and economists as a high-functioning English version of Ukraine, sometimes even called ‘the bread-basket of England’, where steppe-sized harvesters combed squared fields between equally angular chicken sheds. It was a county very hard to comprehend”.

Turner readily describes his book as "amorphous" and his narrative duly wanders amiably through the different regions, building as it does so a fascinating - and no doubt to many readers unexpected - portrait of landscape and place.

Indeed this county-wide tour covers pretty much every quarter, taking the reader from the "huge and muddy maw" of The Wash and the flat, reclaimed fenland of "South Holland" to Lincoln "the City on the Cliff" and the beautiful Wolds, before heading north-east to the Humber and the once great fishing town of Grimsby.

Turner thinks the county is already less distinctive than when he moved there because every day it becomes “a tiny bit more like everywhere else”. There are “more roads, more traffic, more bland homes, and fewer small shops, fewer mouldering old buildings, fewer quiet places, fewer wild animals”.

Lincolnshire, he also observes, has more than its fair share of bungalows with plastic windows, caravan parks, garden centres and chicken farms. “Is it so surprising that so many passing through shake their heads and tap the accelerator?” he asks.

The book is punctuated too with poignant insights and anecdotes, such as: “Lincolnshire people, like people everywhere, have often misused their environment, would probably have exhausted it long ago had they had the means, and must often have resented their lot. But some at least must have loved where they lived, finding a locus for patriotism in the disregarded plain, just as other English see Jerusalem in Barking or Huddersfield.”

As a true convert to an “unfashionable” county, Turner says he first alighted on the prairie-like plains and marshes of Lincolnshire in search of his own “understanding” and, in doing so, discovered a “huge new side to England”.   
                                           
“For all its problems - past, present or projected - Lincolnshire is still a county like no other,” he concludes. “This is an England time half-forgot, where you can still find an unabashed past inside an unpretentious present - and freedom and space on a little offshore island.”

For any potential visitor, armchair traveller or existing resident, whether born and bred in the county or a relative newcomer, this is so much more than a mere guidebook or informative travelogue.

Lincolnshire’s understated chronicles, unfashionable towns and undervalued countryside conceal fascinating stories, as well as unique landscapes - its Wolds are lonely and beautiful, its towns characterful, and its marshlands and dynamic coast metaphors for constant change.

Turner has produced a hauntingly beautiful and honest lament to a rural existence threatened by encroaching modernity, materialism and standardisation as well as the accumulating effects of climate change. If ever a county deserved a book all of its own then it must be the oft overlooked one of Lincolnshire. 

 

 

 

 

 

Editor's note: This review was written by Clive Simpson for the Central Bylines website and published under the title 'Testament to Lincolnshire' in January 2023.

'Edge of England - Landfall in Lincolnshire’ was published by Hurst in 2022, ISBN: 9781787386983. 

Purchase from your local independent bookshop!