Marianne Greated Exhibition at Callendar House Explores Industrial Landscapes in Vivid Colour

06.12.2025

Marianne Greated, ‘Yellow Trees’ (c. 2025). © the artist.

By Lena Kammerer.

This autumn, the second-floor galleries of Callendar House, a stately mansion with origins dating back to the fourteenth century, located within the grounds of Callendar Park in Falkirk, have become host to a series of vibrant, large-scale landscape paintings by artist and researcher Marianne Greated for her exhibition, This Island Earth. The exhibition brings together a new body of work that explores the visual and conceptual intersections between two geographically distant yet strikingly similar sites: a granite quarry in Stubbeløkken on the Danish island Bornholm, where Greated’s mother is from, and the UK’s oldest oil refinery at Grangemouth, just four miles from Callendar House, which was decommissioned earlier this year.

Greated’s selection of subject matter can be seen, at once, as a reclaiming of landscape painting and a challenging of its long-established conventional boundaries. Rather than depicting the pastoral idylls or untouched wildernesses that have historically dominated the genre, Greated turns her gaze toward places moulded by extraction and power generation, where the impacts of human innovation have visibly marked the land. Beyond making for visually fascinating compositions, the works compel viewers to reflect on the complex entanglement between nature, human interference, and its ecological consequences, urging a reconsideration of what constitutes a contemporary landscape.

The artist, whose interests lie in issues surrounding equity and sustainability in a societal and environmental context, explains the core of her work as she shows me around the gallery space. “In the last maybe twenty years, I’ve mainly been working with landscape. I’m looking at how painting responds to landscape. In particular, I’m interested in these human impacts on the landscape.”

Rendered in vivid acrylics and often spread across two or three large panels of board, the immediacy of Greated’s paintings is striking. The eye is drawn to dominant flashes of synthetic hues - acidic yellows, electric blues, vibrant pinks. Where the paint drips, pulled downward by gravity, or the sweeping brushstrokes come together to form the background for the delineated industrial structures, one catches a glimpse of the artist’s direct and intimate engagement with her chosen medium and the physicality it entails, particularly given the imposing scale of many of the works.

Greated observes, “I suppose in painting, you’re always working with flatness. I mean that push and pull between the image itself and the surface. Like the paint dripping. The reality of the paint and the gravity and the mind picking something that you have an image of. Those two are always sitting together fighting, which is what’s interesting about painting.”

Set against the backdrop of Callendar House’s own rich history, where the work of many Scottish women artists has been exhibited and where Greated curated an exhibition by local artist Lys Hansen the previous year, This Island Earth also finds a particularly resonant dialogue with its immediate environment, especially its surrounding parklands.

The landscaped grounds of Callendar Park, natural yet carefully designed, implicitly echo one of the exhibition’s central themes: the interrelation between human innovation and its interaction with and alteration of the natural environment. Inside the gallery, this relationship is made tangible through the placement of one painting directly between two large windows that frame views of the park beyond. And as light shifts through the windows across the day, the tones within the painting subtly transform, mirroring the changing hues of the landscape outside.

Thoughtful, immersive, and visually arresting, This Island Earth - intimate in scale as an exhibition yet expansive in its impact - affirms Greated’s ability to fuse painterly experimentation with environmental reflection, presenting a body of work as conceptually rich as it is sensorially engaging.

 

This Island Earth by Marianne Greated is exhibited at Callendar House until 19th April 2026.