Anthologia II: Katie Trick | A Short Story of Falling by Alice Oswald

For the second instalment of our year-long Anthologia series, we invite Welsh painter Katie Trick to respond to Alice Oswald’s luminous poem A Short Story of Falling.

Oswald’s words trace the cyclical journey of water — falling as rain, flowing through rivers, vanishing into air — a meditation on renewal, persistence, and the quiet transformations that sustain life. Trick’s paintings mirror this sense of flux. “Using the landscape as a means to explore painting, or painting as a means to explore a landscape,” she works intuitively, allowing forms to emerge from the process. Lines take on the cadence of rainfall, colours pool and drift like light across water, and a place — both familiar and elusive — gradually reveals itself.

“Dancing flowers, hot sun, things are changing,

A series of work in response to the landscape around me, from the joy of spring and early first petal, to the scorching heat of summer. Sensing a shift. The act of painting for me has become a strange play between looking closely and memory. Adding Layers to then scrape them away, the paintings and drawings are found. Allowing reoccurring motifs to emerge, anchored into the work. From sun bleached flowers to vivid sunsets and dancing daisies. A subconscious response rather than a clear depiction.

Sat between imagination and observation. Finding ways to give language to the landscape around me. On reflection they seem close and personal, and in constant dialogue between myself, painting and nature.”

In Trick’s work, as in Oswald’s poem, nothing is static. The landscape is ever-changing, a shifting chorus of patterns, stories, and fleeting moments held briefly in view before they dissolve again. Her canvases invite us to sit, look, and listen — to feel the intimacy of a place that is always moving, always remaking itself.

All works are available for sale online throughout the exhibition.