Agnes Treherne 'With the Breathing of the Wind'

A G N E S T R E H E R N E

W I T H T H E B R E A T H I N G O F T H E W I N D

“How often, where the wave

Pours its long sound along the lonely shore,

I’ve paused, and with the breathing of the wind

And with the murmur of the distant sea,

Mixed my own thoughts...”

Charlotte Smith, ‘Beachy Head’, 1807

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There is a kind of attention that does not fix

the world in place, but allows for it to move

- listening for rhythm—watching for the pulse

of light, the turn of weather. Feeling for the

soft shift of presence from one state to another.

Agnes Treherne’s paintings arise from this broad

attentiveness. These paintings are not still.

They breathe.

Drawing, for Treherne, is a way of being in the

present. It is how she gathers up the world around

her, as a kind of hearing carried out with the hand.

Observation, part noticing, part feeling born from

moments of encounter: prosaic, but charged - real,

but transformed. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in

her journal of 1802 “I never saw daffodils so

beautiful, they looked as if they really enjoyed the

wind that blew them.” This simple observation

perhaps distils something of Treherne’s practice.

These works may begin in the everyday, but they

do not stay bound to it. Through deduced and

intuitive making, the image begins to shimmer

with something more: memory, longing and love.

It is at this threshold, where attention deepens

into emotion, that the work finds its magic. As

William Wordsworth wrote in ‘Ode: Intimations of

Immortality’, “Though nothing can bring back the

hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the

flower; / We will grieve not, rather find / Strength

in what remains behind.”

Each painting holds a moment mid-motion: a

shifting shaft of light on water, a figure turning away,

the air experiencing a change in weather. Not as an

arranged scene, but as a lived response. Elemental

forces pass through them—wind, sea, cloud, dusk.

Nothing is static. Even the ground moves. Light

in her work does not simply illuminate—it shifts,

pulses, then lingers. In this, her approach recalls

Vincent Van Gogh, who wrote in a letter to his

brother Theo, “There is a sun, a light, that we must

paint as if we have it within us.”

Her figures, often small, nearly spectral, are less

subjects than participants within the field of vision.

Not offering a rigid clarity, but an ephemerality of

feeling: a sense of proximity to something beyond,

but within grasp, in that sense, sublime. Like

Cézanne, who sought to “realise” the motif through

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repeated seeing, Treherne lets her images become.

Her touch is not illustrative, but perceptual. Forms

shift slightly as though memory were returning

to them in a form that is both transcendent

yet participatory.

This movement - the sense that all things are in

motion - is not only visual; it is philosophical. As

Rainer Maria Rilke observed in ‘The Book of Hours’,

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Treherne’s

paintings ask us to live through their surfaces—to

inhabit the weather of feeling and form, to allow

seeing itself to be an act of presence and absence,

of lost and found. In her work, looking becomes

a form of ethical relation. As John Berger wrote,

“What makes the act of painting extraordinary

is that it is an act of love… The way you look at

anything is the result of the way you have looked

at everything.” This is what Treherne enacts: an

accumulated gaze, sharpened by care and patience,

where attention is never neutral, but charged.

These are paintings very much of, and for, now.

They arise from a contemporary urgency: to slow

down, to notice, to resist abstraction not through

representation, but through care. In a time when

speed flattens depth, Treherne’s work insists on

noticing. It shows us how to attend—to a field,

a shadow, a figure—and in that attention, to

remember what it means to be porous, to feel, and

to belong.

As Virginia Woolf writes in ‘Sketch of the Past’,

“The past only comes back when the present runs

so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a

deep river.” So too do the landscapes we carry with

us, along with our rooms of light and memory and

the weather of feeling we hold within. Treherne

paints these not as interiors or exteriors, but as

places where perception and emotion meet. What

results is not simply beautiful. It is intimate. It is

known. It connects. It is love.

These works do not assert. They invite. They

remind us that to be alive is to be in motion—and

that motion, when truly seen, becomes something

close to grace.

Joseph Clarke, 2025

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The Channel I

oil on birch panel, 31 x 33 cm

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The Channel II


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My Mother By The Sea

oil on canvas, 100 x 120 cm

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Waves Putting Out a Fire


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Sea Kale


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Sandbar


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Bass Rock


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Bucks Stream I


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Bucks Stream II


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Argos Hill


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Mother and Child (Witherenden)


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Clouds


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Coppicing


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Parents, Red Admiral, Nursery Stock


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Parents (Cinderhill)


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Cinderhill


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Witherenden After a Storm


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The Black Barn


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Witherenden


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Ant Hills


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The Boys


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Flooding


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Devils


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Alfriston


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Wind Farm


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Mending


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Hellebore


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Kiwi Plant


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Crowlink, After a Hot Day


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Agnes Treherne lives and works in East Sussex, UK. She is

a graduate from the Royal Drawing School (2019-2021), and

previously studied Fine Art and History of Art at the University of

Edinburgh (2005-2010). Drawing from life underpins her painting

and printmaking – her drawings are a response to the transcendent

nature of the world. ‘With the Breathing of the Wind’ is Treherne’s

debut solo exhibition at Anima Mundi. She is represented by Anima

Mundi and has exhibited her work internationally.

“This exhibition is dedicated to my parents”

Published by Anima Mundi to coincide with Agnes Treherne ‘With the Breathing of the Wind’

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system

or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers

Anima Mundi . Street-an-Pol . St. Ives . Cornwall . +44 (0)1736 793121 . mail@animamundigallery.com . www.animamundigallery.com

www.animamundigallery.com

Agnes Treherne 'With the Breathing of the Wind'

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