Drinking Down The Light : 5 - 25 September 2025

Cassandra Wall showing textiles at The Sewell Gallery, Radley College, Oxfordshire OX14 2HR, curated by Jenny Blyth.

Opening : Friday 5 September from 6-8 pm : You are warmly welcome: RSVP: jennyblythart@gmail.com

Text by Jenny Blyth © 2025

‘When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection’. Agnes Martin

Cassandra Wall composes moments in the landscape through colour and patterning. Her textile ‘paintings’ are hand-stitched patchwork in cottons, colour-matched to her subject. Although Cassandra acknowledges the origins of patchwork created out of thrift by women pioneers of 19th century America, her muses are contemporary Twentieth Century painters such as Agnes Martin, whose beautiful abstract expressionist paintings such as Drift of Summer celebrated the vast open spaces of the Saskatchewan prairies of her childhood. Also Anni Albers, pioneer of textile art and design, whose inspirations ranged from pre-Columbian art to Bauhaus.

Inspiration considered, Cassandra’s intention is founded in her Buddhist practice of 30 years. Celebrating nature and moments in the landscape has been the path for her in finding that quiet limitless space that we associate with meditation. The multiplicity of repetition in her patterning and use of colour impart a sense of oneness and inner calm that we seek from the natural world.

Whether it is the shimmer of light on turquoise seas, or blossom falling in Spring, Cassandra’s textiles articulate a certain nuance of light, colour and mood. Drinking Down the Light recreates the half-light of dusk over a Greek harbour infused with the indigos and lapiz blues of twilight. There is poetry and balm in her abstractions. Upflight captures the flutter of wings as doves take flight, their feathers dusty pink and buff. Her tessellations are complex - snowflakes falling silently in Snow into Water - as whites give way to midnight blues. Her Autumn Hedgerow is flush with damsons, sloes and rosehips.

Cassandra’s working process involves an initial response to the landscape collaged from torn, hand-coloured and sourced papers juxtaposed. Her paper studies are figurative but inform the colour and rhythm of her textile abstractions. These collages are stand-alone art works, but exhibited together with the ensuing textile, they make a beautiful pairing and a portal, one to the other.

Dungeness: Summer and Winter is a seasonal depiction of Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage on the longshore drift on the South East Coast where the tides pile up and wash away the shingle, re-sculpting the littoral shoreline. Stitched to create a quadrant of seasonality - the garden in summer is joyous in colour and form, set against the pared back winter landscape with ocean waves rolling in from The Channel. Cassandra’s collaged study captures the outlook from a small cottage on the shingle of life, Jarman’s retreat during his final years. Her ‘textile painting’ celebrates both the fisherman’s shed ‘as was’, tarred in black with Jarman’s distinctive yellow window frames - and the beautiful ‘boundless’ garden that he planted with native flints, flowers and marine shrubs. One can appreciate how his garden ‘without borders’ resonates with Cassandra’s Buddhist practice where ‘form and void are one and the same’.

In addition to a profound love of British landscape, from Heather Hills in the Peak District, to the Moon Tide series on the longshore drift of the Suffolk coast, Cassandra Wall has for decades explored Greece, capturing the magic of these ‘Islands of the Gods’ from Light on Grecian Seas, Ionian Islands to Dhodhekanisos, Sunset. Her textiles are experiential. They read as paintings, and thus we are able to share her moments in the landscape and immerse ourselves in the beauty of the world around us.

Snow Into Water 2020 featured textile landscapes (figurative & abstracted) by Cassandra Wall’s in a celebration of the beauty of Nature and its liberating and calming effect on the mind. Lockdown enforced a slowdown in the pace of life with all its noise and complexities, and accorded us a unique opportunity to hear the voice of the natural world around us, and the transience that makes it so precious.

CW has been working with textiles since childhood. Her compositions in varying degrees of abstraction that capture the spirit of the landscape, are initiated sur le motif.  Particularly, she is drawn to the longshore drift where the tides pile up and wash away the shingle, re-sculpting the littoral shoreline. Dungeness: Summer and Winter contrasts Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, lit from within on Winter nights, with its wild Summer ‘garden without borders’. Heather Hills features crests and waves of purple heather with backdrafts of golden-green mosses. Her collaged landscapes in torn papers with hints of the patterns and tessellations to come, are precursors to her immaculately handstitched textiles. Transposing her ‘sketches’ to cloth involves sourcing vintage and hand-coloured fabrics some of which she tones with tea, matching her swatches against her chosen subjects.

Contemplating nature’s kaleidescope of beauty, there is ultimately an expression of meditative calm achieved through the repetitions of colour and shape, and the juxtapositions that inform that simplicity and strength.

Wall’s compositions, each created over months, present as contemporary textile ‘paintings’ floating in tray frames, unglazed. Her language is colourfield abstraction towards a state of meditation, delighting in the journey that nature presents dancing towards that end.  All is beautifully expressed as Snow Into Water where the white of falling snowflakes from the sky melts into the blue of waters below.

Previous Exhibitions :

SNOW INTO WATER

Textile Paintings by Cassandra WALL and paintings by Chloe FREMANTLE curated by Jenny Blyth for The North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford OX2 7JN : 29 September - 10 October 2020