Just off the green in the middle of Shaldon village, neatly tucked away behind The London Inn, is Annabelle Hulbert’s Art Room. It is a space so richly scented with oil paint that I feel dizzy when I enter, and so filled with multicoloured artwork that I don’t know what to look at first.
I make sense of it by starting at the logical beginning, with the scribbled pencil notes and paint swatches that Annabelle has pinned to the wall: Naples Yellow, Indian Red, Raw Umber, Bright Green Lake, Ultramarine and Titanium White. These colours and more are amplified all around the studio, on huge pieces of paper and on canvases taller than me. It is a dazzling and fascinating display of painting.
Annabelle is an abstract painter, printmaker and installation artist who has exhibited and curated shows in the USA, Africa, the UK and Northern Ireland. She has a particular interest in process and the interpretation of memory and is a great believer in creative collaboration: The Art Room serves not just as her studio, but as a community art space and venue for her regular drawing and painting classes.
Annabelle enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Devon and has recently returned home after two decades living and raising her children in Northern Ireland, where memory and its translation into visual language became the incentive for her work.
‘When I was in Northern Ireland, I was painting this life here in Devon, this memory, this place,’ she says. ‘I was painting here from far away, painting about being exiled, about not being able to return.’
As an emerging talent Annabelle was the youngest artist at the time to show at London’s prestigious Adam Gallery, and the catalogue from that show describes her painting as ‘a place where experiences and memories are re-lived and worked out’. She continues to explore her own life experiences, which parallel our wider human experience, through the language of abstraction.
‘I don’t come at painting like an abstract expressionist.’ she tells me, ‘where the work only refers to itself. There is always a conversation happening within my work that is reflective of something within me, of conversations about being a woman, being a mother, being away from home, and what it’s like to be back here after so long.’
Conversations, she points out, are becoming more important now than ever before as we all navigate a turbulent world. Displacement, loss, longing and the search for a sense of belonging are experiences that people are facing everywhere, which is why works like these, about the experience of living, are so important.
See Annabelle’s work or book classes at annabellehulbert.com and at The Art Room, The Green, Shaldon, Devon, TQ14 0DN
