ANTHOLOGIA IX
Beatrice Hasell-McCosh

Beatrice Hasell-McCosh x D.H Lawrence

The ninth exhibition in Anthologia brings together a group of vibrant paintings and watercolours by Beatrice Hasell-McCosh that feel as though they are in the middle of becoming. Nothing is entirely fixed: forms drift in and out of focus, colours gather and disperse, and the surface seems to shift the longer you look.

Her work begins with close observation—drawing from life, returning to the same patches of ground—but what emerges in the studio is something looser, more intuitive. Memory reshapes what has been seen. Scale slips. Details expand or dissolve. What matters is not so much what something is, but how it felt to encounter it: the density of growth, the press of things crowding together, the rhythm of change over time.

There’s a natural affinity here with D. H. Lawrence’s The Enkindled Spring, where the season arrives not quietly, but in a rush; bonfires green,” “flame-filled bushes,” a world flickering into life. Hasell-McCosh’s paintings carry something of that same energy. Greens don’t sit still; they flare and pulse. Marks scatter and regroup like sparks. The works feel less like depictions of landscape and more like being inside it, caught in its movement. This sense of immersion is key. You’re not looking at a scene from a distance but moving through it—almost losing your footing as shapes overlap and fragment. Many of the works are built in parts, with repeated motifs that echo one another without quite settling into a single, stable whole. There’s a quiet acceptance here of things being incomplete, or in flux.

The Enkindled Spring
By D.H Lawrence

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.