The Eternal Return of the Peace Campers

Supporting ACE application The Eternal Return of the Peace Campers for Sally Payen MA RCA PhD

Dr Sally Payen PhD University of Brighton, UK, 2005; MA Royal College of Arts, Painting, 1990; BA Hons, Frist Class, Painting, Brighton Polytechnic, 1988.

I have a practice-based research degree in painting, which has equipped me with a strong understanding of the value of research and development opportunities, sourcing material, and incorporating these elements into my artistic practice.

Qigong practice embodies grounding oneself in nature and the wider world, fostering a sense of empathy towards the Earth’s crisis and a commitment to caring for others. The connection between the Icelandic landscape and qigong lies in the inspiring environment it provides. This research and development process will enable me to explore the integration of landscape and movement, contributing to my personal development, enhancing the experience in pop-up workshops during the project, and informing my ongoing engagement with my practice in the future.

More on Iceland and its potential connection to my practice. Being on the boundary between Eurasian and American tectonic plates, which are slowly pulling apart from one another, creates a unique aesthetic quality of earth that is young and in a constant state of change. This is where the stripy colourful landscape comes from that I am inspired to develop in my painting. It is the only place in Europe with this geological aesthetic quality. The youngest mountains in the world are in the Icelandic highlands, formed in recent volcanic eruptions. They are colourful, sparkly, and still radiating heat. A very young lava landscape, the atmosphere is of pre-human, primordial times. The Icelandic highlands are the largest true wilderness in Europe. Yet the glaciers are melting and won’t be accessible forever. For the moment, it is still possible to visit ice caves and glaciers. The Reykjanes Peninsula, after being dormant for over 1,000 years, has woken up and is in a period of intense volcanic activity that will continue with regular eruptions for the next 50–100 years. This is why now is a great time to do visual research there. Every year there is a new eruption, and the landscape dramatically changes again. In the summer, you get the midnight sun, 24-hour daylight, which creates a unique quality of light—a shade of blue-lilac-pink not found anywhere else. A liminal, otherworldly quality to be captured in paint.

Artist Statement

I am a modernist painter who uses symbols and forms to explore the human condition in relationship to landscape, memory, activism, gender, and our entanglement with non-human worlds. In my paintings including the oils and watercolours, I see modernism and time as a subject as the root, in the sense that it is how I was trained and represents the possibility of the sublime and flow state. Flatness and intuitive colour are key elements of the paintings here; colour is made up in the moment hence being a colourist is a rhythmic experience, an emotional bandwidth, poetic, symbolic and societal commitment. I begin oil painting, make a ground and everything emerges out of this ground, whatever I place. In my watercolour work I see the white sheet as the modernist ground. My process is emergent, it is a process of digging, putting paint on, taking it off, as if I find my paintings; I feel this creates presence and hold. The making process both relates to the subjects I explore and is the subject. It is a commitment to Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’, there-being or being-there (in time) in the making of paintings. Painting is a search for truth. It is slippery in the sense that seeing truth comes and goes, it can’t be fixed as it is ever changing. But for me an ultimately successful painting is when I have seen something in the process that I haven’t seen before and then I can’t even say what it was that I witnessed in the making of the painting, it can manifest as a porous in-between state. A consideration of truth in the current situation of a changing climate is bringing in an open-ended series of questions including how we can be good ancestors; reflecting cosmic and mythic views; having empathy for different generations; recognising our entanglement with more than human worlds; and legacy, how and what we want to leave behind. My work often explores particular landscapes, being-there in nature whether or not it is contested land as well as the personal day to day-ness of living.

Recent work:

Below – Floating World, 2025, oil on canvas, 130 x 150cm

Below – The River Watchers, 2025, oil on linen, 160 x 170cm. This painting has just entered the collection of Hereford Museum and Art Gallery. When they reopen after renovation in 2027/8 it will be on permanent display in a exhibit about the river wye.