Blue Elm comprises two separate canvases. On the larger one, a few ragged trees are painted on what appears to be a stage and set against a painted backdrop. In the distance is the blue tree that gives the painting its name, and that echoes the elm tree painted on the smaller canvas to the left. Angelina May Davis has a longstanding interest in landscape painting, rural scenes and in how colour is experienced as memory. This work uses landscape to spotlight what Davis has termed ‘fabricated realities’ – through the metaphor of the English Elm. Often a key feature of English landscape painting, the elm disappeared from the landscape itself in the wake of Dutch Elm Disease. Davis sees the elm as a symbol of loss, of nostalgia and of ‘a distant idea of Englishness’. She is interested in how the past shapes us and how the nostalgia associated with this past might sometimes be ‘fabricated’ or constructed in the same way as a theatrical set. ‘The layers of inequality in society,’ she says, ‘still seem to be rooted in the hierarchies of history.’ Colour is also a key part of her art practice. As someone with synaesthesia, a condition where most things including numbers or words are articulated in her mind as a colour, she works with a particular colour palette that holds layered meanings for her and offers a depth of visual experience for her viewer.
