About

Artist Statement

I make abstract paintings that explore the spaces between—where dreams meet memory, landscape meets imagination, and one version of ourselves gives way to another.

My work begins long before I enter the studio. I gather fragments from dream journals, walks along the wild coastlines of Devon and Cornwall, photographs, sketchbooks and remembered places. These become starting points rather than destinations. Through layering, tearing, scraping back and rebuilding with acrylic, ink, charcoal, pastel and collage, the paintings gradually reveal themselves.

I am drawn to thresholds: caves, shorelines, river crossings, cracks in rock, hidden paths and shifting tides. These are places where change happens, where certainty dissolves and something new can emerge. I see them as metaphors for our inner lives—those moments of transition that shape who we become.

Rather than depicting dreams or landscapes, I paint the experience of moving through them. Figures dissolve into coastlines, memories become colour, and the physical world merges with the imagined. The paintings inhabit the moment when one thing is becoming another.

I work intuitively because I believe discovery happens through making. Each painting is an act of enquiry rather than explanation—a search for the unexpected. My hope is that the work creates space for viewers to pause, reflect and find their own pathways through the visible and the unseen.

 

Bio

Louise Hutton is a contemporary abstract artist based in North Devon.

After a career spanning education, public policy, communications and creative consultancy, she committed to painting full-time in 2024. Her intuitive practice explores the spaces between dreams, memory and landscape through painting, drawing, collage and assemblage.

Inspired by the wild coastlines of Devon and Cornwall, alongside over a decade of recorded dreams, Louise creates layered abstract works that investigate transformation, belonging and the relationship between inner and outer worlds. Working with acrylic, ink, charcoal, pastel and collage, she builds and disrupts surfaces, allowing forms and narratives to emerge through process rather than predetermined composition.

In 2025 she was awarded a Devon Artist Network Artist Development Bursary, exhibited at Thelma Hulbert Gallery and The Beehive during Devon Open Studios, and had three works selected for the International Association for the Study of Dreams' juried international exhibition.

Alongside her visual practice, Louise writes poetry and memoir. She sees painting as a way of paying close attention—to dreams, to landscape and to the subtle transformations that shape our lives.