Shara Hughes in the Studio

'I had so much energy that I just went at this painting,' she says, gesticulating at the harsh jagged lines tacking down Harder Core (2024). 'I didn't know what it was going to be about, but I just really let go. It feels both aggressive and energetic, which I love, but it also reminds me that I need to calm down.'

Hughes grew up in Atlanta, but spent time as a child on her family's pine tree farm in Western Georgia, from which the title of this exhibition derives. Her mother, Patti, was a nurse who worked for her father, Joe, a retired orthopaedic surgeon and amateur artist, who presents a selection of his own paintings alongside Hughes's works in the main gallery.

Initially, after graduating from Rhode Island School of Design (2004), and later Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2011), Hughes made paintings of domestic interiors—That's a Wall of Plants (2007), for example—deploying this format as a rubric for any subject that she wanted to depict, whether internal or external.

Soon, however, trees quickly replaced figures as the protagonists, with Hughes preferring that the canvas should 'belong' either to herself or to the viewer, rather than to the depicted human being that adorned it.

Eschewing the more obvious choice to render her 'Tree Farm' paintings in landscape format, Hughes tasks the white cube itself with the role of the landscape: each vertical canvas frames a single tree, some willowy, some spindly, yet all rendered in the artist's unmistakable signature palette.

This tactic marks a shift in the artist's practice. Earlier works, such as The Bridge (2020–21), for instance, were horizontal in format, allowing the eye to wander around the vegetation-dense landscapes or open meadows that framed each tree. Here, every spindly protagonist is barely contained within its hefty two-and-a-half by one-and-a-half metre canvas. And, where light—or context—does shine through, viewers would be hard pressed to identify that life beyond.

As one steps back to admire the paintings at scale in the artist's studio, you almost land in Hughes's latest venture: an army of tabletop ceramics modelling arboreal varieties, laid out across two wooden tables. There must be 40 or 50 of them, each less than 25 centimetres tall.

No two the same, they range from perforated stalagmite-type forms to multi-coloured fungal spores to the umbrella-shaped crown of a dragon blood tree—an extraordinary species, native to the Yemeni Island of Socotra, which I've gawked at while tumbling down an online, arboreal rabbit hole.

'While they each have their own brushstrokes and their own area that stands out,' reflects Hughes, picking up a sculpture resembling a tinsel-clad Christmas tree. 'As a whole, they come together to create this "Tree Farm"' environment that is reflected in the paintings.'

Hughes's paintings are, of course, as much about the artistic process as they are depictions of the natural world. These latest works underscore the artist's alchemical ability to create vertiginous depth through a clustering of acrylic daubs in a densely saturated palette while simultaneously harbouring light from a range of natural sources.

Landscapes such as Come and Get It (2024), for example, seem almost to sparkle from the moondust flecked across its deep violet sky, while Play More (2024) glints with white flakes of falling snow. Resilience (2024)—a smaller, squarer canvas—sees a red root reaching tall towards the sun, a subject to which Hughes has devoted many paintings and a number of shows.

This devotion brings to mind a strong lineage of female painters—including Hilma af Klint, Georgia O'Keeffe, Yayoi Kusama, and Judy Chicago—for whom the powerful symbol was absorbed into their everday practice.

'It's fascinating to me that the way we see colour is reflected in the sun—at different times of day, colours and light constantly change,' Hughes explained to Ocula. And standing in her light-filled studio on a blissful Sunday morning, with the sun beating down on the psychedelic wonderlands, you come to understand exactly where this fascination lies.