'GARDENERS OF EDEN': CLAIRE MILNER – SOLO EXHIBITION

Claire Milner is emerging as a distinctive voice in contemporary art, recognised for work that is both visually compelling and conceptually urgent. Her practice engages with one of the defining challenges of our time – the impact of human activity on the natural world – through paintings that are contemplative, immersive, and emotionally resonant. This September, her latest body of work, Gardeners of Eden, will be presented in a solo exhibition at Noon Powell Fine Art in Richmond, London.

 

The exhibition brings together a significant body of paintings in which tropical forest landscapes become richly layered environments inhabited by endangered and vulnerable species. Working with natural earth pigments, Milner creates compositions in which animals emerge from dense vegetation, disappear into their surroundings and reappear on closer looking. At the centre of the exhibition is The Hidden and the Revealed, created by Milner as part of a collaboration with artist and conservationist Haley Mellin and the artist-founded nonprofit Art into Acres. One hundred per cent of proceeds from the sale of the painting will support the permanent protection of tropical forest in Suriname, extending the exhibition’s exploration of biodiversity into direct conservation action.

 

Running through the exhibition is a fundamental question: what sustains life, and what happens when those delicate systems begin to disappear? Milner explores this through layered, shifting landscapes where abstraction and figuration coexist. Forms emerge and dissolve; creatures flicker into view only to recede into their surroundings. These works evoke ecosystems in flux, suspended between abundance and loss, carrying a sense of deep time while reflecting the urgent pressures of the present. Subtle echoes of art history appear in imagined, jungle-like environments that recall earlier visions of nature, now reconfigured into something more unsettled and contemporary.