Leaves and lungs feature in latest exhibition at The Gallery, Chard (From Yeovil Express)

Leaves and lungs feature in latest exhibition at The Gallery, Chard

11:23am Tuesday 10th July 2012 in What's On By Jamie Brooks

AN unusual combination of leaves and lungs are represented in paintings on show in an exhibition in Chard this month.

Isobel Cliff, from Alresford, north of Winchester, is exhibiting a range of her work focusing on rainforests at The Gallery Café Bar and Bistro on Holyrood Street through July.

The exhibition considers the fact that to live people have to breath every second of the day - and without oxygen people would die almost immediately. Isobel has tried to express this in a visual form - using microscopes at the Bio Medical Imaging Unit at Southampton Hospital Trust to take micrographs of the human landscape of breath, alveoli in the lungs and of chloroplasts, the landscape of breath in leaves and plants.

Using the micrographs, Isobel then painted pictures of the microscopic views of lungs and leaves - sometimes in combination as “symbiosis” to convey a spiritual action of breathing and harmony with all living things.

Alongside this work Isobel has also painted scenes from the rainforests as she remembers them from visits to Tasmania, Queensland and New Zealand, and they are on show alongside photographs also taken while she was on her travels.

Isobel said: “All of the paintings are different memories of things I was drawn to, like duckbilled platypus in Tasmania and Queensland, and the rare cassowary birds in Tasmania.

“With the microscopic work I just can't understand how people are so fractured from the natural world they are in - and I wanted to represent that.”

FOR more information on the exhibition call The Gallery on 01460-261001 or follow the related link on this story.