'Materia Metaphysica' by Fiona Owen

Fiona Owen has been a professional artist for more than 45 years. Her fascination has always been with the natural world, plants being her foremost passion. She has always grown most of the plants that she paints.

Fiona paints in oil on gessoed panel, gilding her illuminations with Italian goldleaf in the tradition of the medieval monks’ manuscripts, which was her specialist student study.

Her gilded panels are an honouring of Nature, woven with layers of alchemical symbolism and sacred geometry, each piece created with the focused intention of invoking the ancient and healing Green Magic of the Land.

This exhibition is the culmination of a decade of herbal studies and a continuation of the ‘Weeds in the Heart’ project that she has been working on with Stroud-based herbalist Nathaniel Hughes.