The great gathering II

Chelsea Young’s paintings offer a quiet but profound reimagining of the African landscape. She reveals not the violence or grandeur so often associated with the wild, but its subtle, nurturing intelligence, its capacity for tenderness, regeneration, and care. Her work calls us to witness the softness within Mother Nature: the hush before a summer storm, the warmth of soil after rain, the instinctive gentleness of a lioness with her cub.

Through her practice, Young honours the internal rhythms of the land, the ancient patience of seeds waiting for rain, the emotional memory of a landscape that sustains rather than conquers. Her work is an invitation to slow down, to feel, and to remember that even in the wild, there is room for softness.

Her canvases hold no clear horizons or familiar forms, yet they are deeply rooted in place. The viewer is drawn into a space that feels elemental dust, heat, wind, silence filtered through the artist’s own inner world. It is not nature as seen from the outside, but as breathed from within.

Rather than presenting a fixed image, her work opens a space. A place to pause, to reflect, to remember. It invites a different kind of looking—one that is inward, feeling-based, and open. In this way, Chelsea offers us not just paintings, but moments of return: to self, to earth, and to the possibility of peace.

“My work is an invitation to observe memory. To celebrate its beauty, complexity, and capacity to shape our individual and collective identities."