The Land is Speaking: Daisy Dodd-Noble | Massimo de Carlo
This exhibition makes monstrous use of a folkloric idea: that the land talks back, if you’re paying attention. (It’s the second exhibition I’ve featured this summer that centres on a sentient landscape.) Daisy Dodd-Noble’s trees, plants and hills are all painted from life, but are all surreally unwholesome. Her branches bobble threateningly under syntheticcoloured skies. Caricatures, not landscapes.
Two works anchor the show: Watermeadow Winter and Watermeadow Summer. The same watermeadow, pictured, months apart. Dodd-Noble clearly went back to these places again and again, across a full turn of the seasons. Maybe she watched how the light and growth changed the same patch of ground, but she didn’t try to portray these changes straight.
Watermeadow Winter (2026)
In winter, the curve of the river glimmers metalically, clawed at by talon-like branches. The sky is less Constable than Hieronymous Bosch.
Watermeadow Summer (2026)
The horror intensifies in summer, with disease-spore like, lividly pink flowers studding the edges of the canvas.
“As my familiarity deepened,” the artist says, “so too did my sense of the possibility that the land possesses a form of sentience, or that a tree might hold a spirit or presence of its own with which we can form a connection.”
If the land really is thinking, it isn’t thinking anything comforting.
The Land is Speaking: Daisy Dodd-Noble is at Massimo de Carlo (London). 25 June - 21 August 2026