The Place I Call Home: Florence Hutchings

Union Gallery is pleased to present Florence Hutchings’ The Place I Call Home, across both our spaces, curated by William Gustafsson.

Hutchings’ surrounds herself with objects, drawings, plants, images and postcards that inspire her to create. Often, she relentlessly draws in her home, expanding her practice from the studio, bringing her work into the domestic sphere. This has been evermore been present during the recent lockdown, where Hutchings’ was forced to adopt her own domesticity as her primary source of influence. The sink in the bathroom, the stand in the sitting room, the plants, pots, and vases which make up her home. Hutchings’ work is not just a documentation of the everyday. She uses a diverse vibrant palette and varied modes of painting to create a dialogue between the actual and the abstracted, regenerated version of the mundane she produces.

The works exhibited in The place I call home delve into various aspects of Hutchings’ practice and lend to her ways of making. Her tendency to work in series is evident in the works shown. Each work presented is a pair or is featured in an extended series, whilst holding the overarching theme of the interior. Hutchings’ often creates a body of work in various scales and mediums simultaneously. With a particular work the use of bold and complimentary colours, ie. the mix of bright yellow and a burnt red or a deep purple and earthy green, allows them to stand alone devoid of being presented together. Yet, it is Hutchings’ exquisite use of colour and painterly language which allows each work to hold their own different energy whilst being able bounce off each other when displayed as a group.

Hutchings’ work is labour intensive, pushing and moving paint whilst collaging. She builds up a pictorial image, then reduces, reworking it to something much simpler yet still holding the intended organic textures. Within her work, she finds the background, such as the carpet or wall, is just as important as a plant stand or sink. Hutchings’ approaches all her work with the same intensity with the small works even becoming more physical as they have been worked mainly on the floor, the drips down the side of the canvas usually show when she has worked in this way.



Florence Hutchings (b. 1996, Kent, UK) is a graduate of The Slade School of Art with First Class Honours (2015-2019) Selected exhibitions include: ‘Florence Hutchings and Danny Romeril’ The Cabin, LA, USA (2019; ‘Kaleidoscope’ Saatchi Gallery, London (2019); ‘The Poetry of the Everyday’, BEERS London, London (2019); ‘Seating Arrangement’ Delphian Gallery, London (2018)



Hutchings lives and works in London, UK