Mia Graham: Burial

The exhibition opens with an etching featuring the Angel Oak in Peckham Rye, near the artist’s home. This tree, historically revered for its longevity, is believed to have inspired William Blake’s first vision in 1765. He describes an encounter with “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.”

The concept for Burial has its origins in a book, found by the artist at a tiny second-hand bookshop in Liverpool.“In a Country Churchyard”, by Ronald Fletcher, explores the profound ways English churchyards commemorate past generations, grounding us in our historical roots. Graham’s work distils these fundamental and universally resonant truths, revealing the cyclical nature of life and the intrinsic bond between woman and nature. 

Graham’s ethereal figures inhabit realms of both serene stillness and bursts of dynamic energy, reflecting the recurring motifs of rabbits and hares - historically, symbols of vitality, rebirth and resurrection. Birds, often emblematic of the spiritual realm, transcend their conventional boundaries and slip into pale abstraction, only to be pulled back into reality by their curled dark claws. Within Graham’s artistic vocabulary, these animals become conduits of connectivity between the realms of heaven and earth. 

Informed by an acute awareness of both human and animal experiences, Graham’s work visually integrates nature with biographical representations. The result is often allegorical and psychological, played out through an intricate interplay of expressive and lyrical mark-making that, at times, incorporates unconventional materials such as human hair and coffin-like nails. Traversing this fine line between life and death, Graham’s work invites us into a state of reflection that is morbidly comforting - a knowledge that all that has happened, all that will happen has happened before, and life will go on, and on.