Lottie Hampson (b. 1993, London, England) is an artist and residency curator currently based in the UK. 

For her exhibition entitled The Garden, Lottie Hampson presents a new series of etchings created over the past year in her studio in South London. Images captured on camera and drawings recorded in her sketchbooks have been reproduced in a printmaking studio as photo-polymer etchings. Through weaving together fragments of the natural world Lottie has created an imagined garden - a landscape of the mind; one that breeds wildlife, bears fruit and creates space to get lost in.

The images Lottie makes are a quiet meditation on her surroundings, slowly building a sense of place through observations of light and landscapes, interiors and objects, fragments of the people and creatures that inhabit these places.

The concept for this show came together as Lottie researched the Bloomsbury group and the garden at Charleston house where they lived. Noticing how the surrounding garden makes appearances into Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s paintings - whether it’s framed by an open window or exists as a vase of flowers on a table, or a bowl of fruit front and centre of a still life scene – it proves a source of constant inspiration to the artist. With a desire to create her own imagined garden and inspired by the likes of photographers Karl Blossfeldt and Awoiska van der Molen, her recent images are intimate studies of the natural world often taken on a macro-lens, pieced together to create a dreamlike idyll.

One that slowly uncovers the emotional and physical qualities of Lottie’s personal experiences in the landscape. Lottie’s practice encompasses a variety of mediums, and the physical process of making is important to her. She uses primarily 35mm and medium format analogue cameras for their capacity to encourage slower, closer looking. Negatives are developed and scanned and printed, and for this work, reproduced in a printmaking studio as etching plates.

Each piece is then printed by hand, which continues the laborious and intimate sequence of slow processes, creating a sense of depth and
turning each work into a unique artifact.