Rock of Ages

Emii Alrai reflects on Barns-Graham’s ‘pilgrimage’ to the landscape that left a lasting impression on her work

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham painted Three Rocks 1952 in St Ives, Cornwall three years after she had climbed the Grindelwald glaciers. Following her return from the Swiss Alps, she produced around 60 semi-abstract depictions of the glacial landscape. The experience had greatly affected Barns-Graham and continued to be an anchor in her imagination even as she turned towards other territories and subjects in the years to come.

Unlike the works in the glacier series that had immediately preceded it – all speckled with crystal line blue and teeming with dancing light – the first thing you encounter in this painting are three looming black rocks. Embedded in them are broken figure like forms, introspective and jagged, like pallbearers carrying the winter’s dreich, silver sky. They whisper knowingly among themselves, discussing their hope of ascension while preparing for the burdened nature of descent. In the space between them, you can almost feel the hot breath of urgency.

Although the landscape depicted in Three Rocks might suggest a bleak romanticism peculiar to Scot land’s east coast, where Barns-Graham was born, or St Ives in the season of mud, in this confederation, I wonder whether the figures are echoes of her pilgrim age to Grindelwald. Three Magi, journeying towards a black disc on the leaden horizon; or perhaps, with their pockets lighter following their anointments, mapping the best route home.

To undertake a pilgrimage, whether in a religious context or in pursuit of nature, requires sacrifice. Pilgrimage asks you to contend with not just the person you are, but where, and who, you will be once you have arrived. As the filmmaker and writer Mark Cousins described it, after following in Barns-Graham’s footsteps at Grindelwald: ‘Pilgrimages are about self-loss.’ We tend to leave a part of ourselves behind when encountering a landscape marked by profound rupture. Perhaps this self-loss becomes the pilgrim’s bargain: that a portion of the self is given to the mountain, and in return, the mountain’s mystery becomes forever imprinted on the heart.

To stand before a glacier is to witness the deep time and architecture of our beginnings. The awe it inspires lies both in the minute geometries traced across its surface and in the leviathan contortions of water frozen into ice over millennia. Glaciers are forces of division as much as formation; they carve valleys, sever landscapes, and redraw the boundaries by which we now understand place, state and belonging.

Barns-Graham described the Grindelwald glaciers as being made of glass. A place where one could look inwards while confronting an immense sense of strength that is shadowed by impermanence: ‘a thin ness that seemed always on the verge of dissolving into absence’, she wrote. Nature has the capacity to silence us into wonder, reminding us how closely our lives mirror its rhythms. Like landscapes, our bodies exist in a continual state of erosion and quiet col lapse. In all of its frequencies, Three Rocks performs a meditative dirge – a reflection on what one must leave behind in order to walk forwards, while already mourning what has yet to be lost.

Haroun Hayward finds a kindred spirit in Barns-Graham’s refusal to be confined to a single style

The art world has never seemed to approve when an artist resists neat categorisation. Looking across the breadth of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s career, one senses a restless spirit. Her work reflects a desire to be free and to explore – to not be hemmed in by just one form of expression. The artist frequently worked in series, understanding the power of sticking at an idea and developing it, but she also moved between many different styles over her lifetime. Many artists will recognise in themselves this sense of curiosity. Barns-Graham’s conviction in the power of continued experimentation is inspiring, and part of what makes her a true painter’s painter.

I’m struck by the 40-year gap between her foundational glacier works of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the dynamic drawings – created using a mix of chalk, pastel, gouache and acrylic – that she made on her annual trips to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands from 1989 to 1993. In the interim, she played with different visual languages: from her depictions of the Cornish coast using a style of semi-abstraction synonymous with the St Ives painters in the mid-20th century, to a hard-edge aesthetic which, in its angular geometry, feels akin to the work of modernist artists in the tradition of the Bauhaus in Germany.

Barns-Graham’s return to nature and observational drawing after this period of more abstract work speaks to her continual drive to experiment, but there is also something poignant about this loopback to the landscape towards the end of her life. While there is a stylistic progression between these two bodies of work created almost half a century apart, they share a dynamic relationship. This is perhaps not surprising given the subject matter. Barns-Graham’s experiences on the glaciers at Grindelwald revealed the nature of these giant, ever-changing entities: to her, they seemed alive. Lanzarote, conversely, is a static, volcanic landscape, but one that, at one point, would also have been alive and flowing.

There is a similar tension at play in both series of works. In the glacier paintings, Barns-Graham’s line is fluid but used in the service of building solid, crystalline and mountainous forms. The Lanzarote works have a more graphic quality that bears the trace of her abstract experiments of the 1960s to 1980s, but at the same time they reflect a greater sense of freedom. I’m drawn to the mixture of styles often seen in a single work, such as Lava Movement, La Geria 1993 or Volcanic Island (Near Montana del Fuego II) 1989, where strong graphic lines meld into and over painterly sfumato blends.

Like Barns-Graham, I make work that is born of a desire not to stick to any one style. My collage paintings have become identifiably my own, but the crux of them is my magpie nature and a rejection of the constriction that comes with following only one path.

I own an acrylic painting on paper by Barns Graham titled Lanzarote 1989 – the first serious piece of art I bought. A black hill rises from the dark green and black volcanic landscape. In the foreground are white impressions of rocks and striations. A touch of red appears like a flame in the distance. I was drawn to this work instantly. While graphic and bold in its composition, up close, a soft painterly quality prevails in application and tone. This sums up a lot of what Barns-Graham means to me, and what I draw from her approach to apply in my own practice: a conflation of styles that sounds as one harmonious note.

^{Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, 24 October 2026 – 3 May 2027}

^{Emii Alrai is a Scottish-Iraqi artist who works in the UK. She was the 2025 Assetto Fellow at the Warburg Institute, and her work will be shown at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate and in Listening to the earth at the Drawing Room, London this autumn.}

^{Haroun Hayward is an artist based in London. His first solo institutional show, Haroun Hayward: Path through Trees is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 1 November. An exhibition pairing the work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and new work by Haroun Hayward will open at Hales London later in the autumn.}

^{Supported by the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Exhibition Supporters Circle and Tate Members.}