ONYA MCCAUSLAND | TAILINGS
We are proud to present a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed British artist Onya McCausland, running 25 April - 30 May. Known for her pioneering practice that reconfigures industrial waste residues as rich, site-specific colour, McCausland will unveil new work developed from pigments sourced from the post-industrial landscape.
This exhibition continues Close Gallery’s longstanding commitment to supporting art that confronts climate concerns and examines our evolving relationship with the natural world. McCausland’s work, grounded in ecological research and environmental regeneration, demonstrates how contemporary painting can engage audiences with urgent questions of sustainability, material legacy, and landscape transformation.
What is most compelling about McCausland’s paintings is the way they perform a double reading: they seduce first, then quietly unsettle.
At first glance the works appear restrained, luminous, almost meditative. Broad fields of colour feel elemental and patiently composed. Their surfaces are breathable rather than dense powdery, matte, softly striated evoking weathered walls, geological layers, or distant horizons dissolving into the atmosphere.
Her palette is deceptively gentle: muted ochres, rust reds, bruised yellows, smoky umbers. These tones recall ancient frescoes and early earth painting traditions, grounding the work in something almost timeless. There is a strong sense of restraint: no gestural excess, only careful accumulation and close attention to the behaviour of materials.
Within this quietness a sense of the sublime emerges. The paintings invite contemplation and bodily closeness; they feel grounded, even restorative.
Yet that calm is subtly destabilised.
Once the origin of the pigments becomes clear industrial waste ochres produced through mining remediation the paintings register differently. Colour is no longer neutral or pastoral; it becomes evidence.
McCausland’s aesthetic hinges on this reversal: what appears natural and harmonious is in fact the residue of environmental disturbance. These pigments are chemically altered byproducts of quarrying, mining, and the treatment of polluted water systems. The works quietly insist that extraction does not end when industry leaves; it lingers, settling into the land.
Rather than depicting destruction, McCausland allows the materials themselves to speak. The absence of representation is crucial: the history is embedded within the pigment itself.
Her deep engagement with geology, chemistry, and site-specific research gives the work unusual authority. These surfaces are not symbolic approximations of landscape; they are landscape chemically and historically compressed into colour. Through burning, milling, and refining the ochres, shifts in tone and density correspond directly to transformations in matter.
The paintings behave less like images and more like material records, carrying both ecological memory and industrial aftermath.
Importantly, McCausland resists spectacle. There is no visual catastrophe, no didactic message. Instead, her restraint becomes ethical. By refusing to dramatise damage, she allows viewers to encounter these histories slowly and thoughtfully. The beauty is genuine but complicated. The pleasure of looking is inseparable from the knowledge that these colours exist because the land was pushed beyond endurance.
About the Artist
Onya McCausland is a British artist whose work explores landscape, materiality, and the histories embedded within the earth’s surface. A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, her practice spans painting, material research, and community-engaged projects.
Working at the intersection of contemporary painting, ecology, and environmental research, McCausland transforms the by-products of former mining landscapes into complex pigments, reframing what is typically dismissed as waste into a language of colour and place.
