BLUSHING
sylwia narbutt

october 2025

BLUSHING is a new exhibition by Polish visual artist Sylwia Narbutt exploring how displacement affects her relationship with the British landscape. Drawing on memories of mossy Polish woods and tales of Sherwood forest, Narbutt paints the gnarled roots and broken branches of the ancient Oaks and Hornbeams native to this country, abstracting them to feel animated, haunted, almost anthropomorphic. In working with organic themes, she examines our relationship with nature and asks: how much access we have to it, who owns it and why so much is cordoned off behind walls and barbed wire? What is hidden in these wild territories and what happens when we trespass these boundaries?

Narbutt restricts her colours to those of a make-up palette, using shades of blush and lipstick to convey her own constraints as a woman artist as well as the emergency facing our landscape. She challenges our perspective by swapping the conventional greens, blues and browns of the natural world, for the hot shades of sunrise and sunset, the pink of flowering heather, the copper of dried bushes, the magenta of squished bilberry…

The result is a nostalgic, dream-like world, punctuated with urgency and unease. Narbutt seems to say: Nature is beautiful, we love this landscape, but something is very wrong.

Sylwia Narbutt received an MFA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw before coming to London in 2006. She co-founded Inland Project, a portable exhibition in zine format founded in response to the uncertain future of affordable art space in London and is a co-director of SMALL WORKS, a curatorial project and platform supporting artists.