How Place Shapes My Artistic Vision: A Journey Through Landscape, Emotion, and Quiet Transformation

Place has always seeped into my work like weather, slowly at first, then all at once. I’ve never been able to separate the art I make from the ground beneath my feet. Every landscape I’ve lived in has carried its own emotional climate, shaping my colours, my compositions, and the way I understand myself through the act of creating.

Fragments as Footprints

Collage was my first way of mapping the world. I tore and layered pieces of paper the way memory layers itself, imperfectly, instinctively. Each fragment held a trace of somewhere I’d been, something I’d passed through, a texture or tone I wasn’t ready to let go of.
It felt like building small universes out of the remnants of many places, stacking experience the way cliffs are made of sediment: slowly, quietly, honestly.

Edinburgh: The City of Interior Weather

Edinburgh wrapped itself around me in stone and shadows. Its narrow closes and vast skies held a beauty that was almost too heavy to touch. In that grandeur, I felt myself retreat inward. The city echoed with history, but inside I felt strangely unanchored, a quiet isolation that found its way into my art.

My work became a landscape of thoughts: layered, uncertain, fogged at the edges. I explored mental health themes not through grand statements, but through atmospheres, subtle shifts in tone, muted palettes, and figures dissolving into their surroundings.
It was a city where I learned how much an environment could amplify internal weather systems.

Falmouth: A Soft Return to Breath

Falmouth, by contrast, felt like exhaling. The light arrived differently here, gentler, salt-washed, patient. There is something in the way the sea opens itself to you, in the way the wind carries colour, in the quiet hum of green spaces that never feel the need to rush.

This place softened me.
It softened my work, too.

In Falmouth, I began creating with a sense of slow ritual, letting the natural rhythms around me seep into my process. Peace and calm were no longer distant themes but daily companions. My palette opened; my compositions began to breathe. I felt at home in a way I hadn’t expected, held by cliffs, tide, and the hush of early mornings.

Place as a Living Medium

Every landscape I’ve lived in has shaped my vision differently. Edinburgh taught me to listen to the darker, quieter rooms within myself. Falmouth taught me to inhabit softness without apology. And collage continues to remind me that every journey, every moment of isolation or belonging, becomes part of a layered whole.

My art is simply the trace of each place passing through me.

With love and minerals,
Ellie Jane