Twenty years on from the death of artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, 2024 offers another moment to survey her enduring influence upon many artists making and showing work today.
Following the unveiling of a plaque in St Andrews, where she was born, the rest of 2024 sees a wealth of Barns-Graham-related activities, as the once-overlooked artist is rightly celebrated for a rigorous and consistently inventive approach throughout her long career.
Lime Green, Orange and Blue Mediterranean
1972
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) 
This year two new books will be published: an illustrated book for children by Annabel Wright and Kate Temple (An Introduction to the Life of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham With Activities) and a new collection, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: The Glaciers, which focuses on the huge impact that a visit to the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland in May 1949 had upon the artist's subsequent works.
Glacier, Grindelwald, Switzerland
1949
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) 
Edited by Rob Airey, director of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust, and including a complete catalogue of the artist's glacier paintings, the book includes contributions from art historian and curator Alice Strang, glaciologist Peter Nienow, poet Alyson Hallett and film-maker Mark Cousins. Cousins is also releasing a new documentary, A Sudden Glimpse into Deeper Things, which likewise focuses on this transformative moment in Barns-Graham's life and work.
What is it about Barns-Graham that continues to exert such a strong pull? There are infinite possible answers to this question, with each person bringing their own particular interests to bear upon the work.
Just In Time
(edition 9/75) 1999
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) 
For Lynne Green, who wrote the first monograph on Barns-Graham in 2001, it is her 'spirit' as an artist that is as much an influence on today's artists as any particular technical, thematic or aesthetic component of the work itself. 'For the artists I know who admire her,' she tells me, 'it's really about her way of being in the world: her tenacity, determination and bloody-mindedness as a woman to keep on painting.'
For me, as somebody whose writing tends to focus on artists engaging with ecological questions, it is Barns-Graham's ability to combine multiple scales and temporalities into her landscape works.
Last year I visited a major exhibition of Barns-Graham's works at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle. One particular work stands out: Snow at Wharfedale I (1957). It shows a curving Yorkshire hillside made up of snowy fields, painted as geometric white slaps demarcated by straight lines of dark grey hedge or wall. The result is somehow grubby and elegant at the same time.
Prefiguring certain discussions around the Anthropocene, paintings such as this remind me of the writings of Jacquetta Hawkes, who could almost induce vertigo with her dizzying links across scales and time. Take a sentence like this from Hawkes' A Land (1951): 'By the end of the Palaeozoic era the possibility of Wordsworth was assured.'
Like Hawkes, Barns-Graham also forges deep connections – both speculative and richly material – between the living present and the ancient, geological past we inhabit every day.
Artist Siobhan McLaughlin is also drawn to this aspect of Barns-Graham's practice. 'She was really drawn to tackle the landscape in a way that wasn't romantic,' says McLaughlin, whose own work weaves together a range of media to explore the materiality of landscape through abstraction.
Toward Lizard Point
earth pigments on mixed remnant materials by Siobhan McLaughlin (b.1994) 
After receiving the SSA Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Award for a work of merit in 2019, McLaughlin began to discover several parallels between Barns-Graham’s life and her own: both artists studied Painting at ECA, took time off for illness in their penultimate year, and both, at age 28, travelled to Cornwall to work.
Cruthan-tìre (Newlyn/Cromarty)
earth pigment & oil paint on sewn remnant materials by Siobhan McLaughlin (b.1994) 
Like Barns-Graham, McLaughlin found inspiration in South West Cornwall, thanks to a residency award from the Trust and Visual Arts Scotland in 2022, and she is now on the board of trustees. On the day we speak, McLaughlin is visiting Barns-Graham's former studio in Porthmeor as part of an ongoing collaborative project.
Perhaps these parallels explain some resonances between their works: in 2018–2019, McLaughlin produced a series of monoprints of the landscapes around Lochnagar. In their terracotta tone and sparseness of line, they hold an echo of Barns-Graham's work, Eight Lines, of which a 1986 chalk version is in Tate's collection and a later acrylic painting (1995–1997) is owned by the Trust.
Untitled (Lochnagar Print II)
monoprint on newsprint by Siobhan McLaughlin (b.1994) 
Based in Edinburgh, the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust was established by the artist herself in 1987 and it was a stipulation from the beginning that there should always be a practising artist on the board.
The Trust has four key purposes: to protect and promote her reputation; to advance knowledge of her work through exhibitions, research and publications; to care for the archive of her life and work; and to support new generations of artists and art historians through bursaries and scholarships.
This year, the Trust is curating a presentation of works by Barns-Graham for the British Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery (26th to 29th September). The year 2024 offers several further opportunities to see Barns-Graham's work in person: Red Table (1952), a small, angular gouache on hardboard, is part of a significant exhibition dedicated to still life at Pallant House (until 20th October). An exhibition of Barns-Graham's screenprints is also at Gallery East, Woodbridge, from 20th September.
As Lynne Green told me, Barns-Graham was always inventing, right from her early years studying at Edinburgh College of Art all the way into her 90s. McLaughlin agrees: 'You can see her work evolve over her life. It changed so much but there is always a buzzing energy throughout it all.'
In particular, McLaughlin points to works such as Glasgow Airport (1971), an extraordinary composition of coloured circles against a dark backdrop, which was another stand-out work in the Hatton Gallery retrospective.
Where McLaughlin speaks of 'energy', artist Erin McQuarrie refers similarly to the 'vibrancy' of Barns-Graham's work.
McQuarrie is due to undertake a three-week residency at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney, as part of the Royal Scottish Academy's Residencies for Scotland programme, with support from the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust.
'It's a landscape I've been thinking about for a long time,' she says, 'but I've never been able to visit until now. So it's a magical thing to be able to do.' McQuarrie adopts an expansive approach to textile-making, with work frequently taking on sculptural or architectural forms and using ancient techniques to incorporate found objects, textile waste and other non-traditional materials.
The Language of the Air
2021, silk, linen, wool, miscellaneous yarns, paper & stone by Erin McQuarrie (b.1993) 
McQuarrie points to Barns-Graham's 'Small Energy' drawings of the 1970s and 1980s as a point of cross-over. In contrast to the more geometric/geological works that I'm drawn to, McQuarrie is fascinated by the way Barns-Graham evokes the movement of the wind and the ocean in small-scale mixed media works such as Surge (1978) and Whirlpool (1979).
When you look at their works side by side, it's clear how the creation of organic forms through repetitive line-making would appeal to a textile artist like McQuarrie.
On this Orkney residency, McQuarrie plans to spend time researching the islands' Neolithic landmarks. For McQuarrie, this desire to be outside in the world is another similarity she recognises in Barns-Graham: 'What's always attracted me about Barns-Graham,' she says, 'is her impulse to travel and immerse herself in landscapes. She was clearly fascinated by how places are formed, how that impacts the people who live there and how she might be able to respond to that through art.'
Brown, Green and Ochre with White Line (Orkney)
1988
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) 
With pandemic lockdowns a recent memory and climate crisis a pressing reality, engaging with the non-human world is both a pleasure and an imperative. In its rhythms and its rigour, Barns-Graham's work will continue to inform how artists tackle these fundamental subjects for years to come.
Tom Jeffreys, freelance writer
This content was supported by Creative Scotland
