Lara Cobden

Artist Profile

Lara Cobden (b. 1971, London). Lives and works in Norwich.

Lara Cobden paints landscapes built from memory. Working mainly in oil, often combined with ink and wax, she paints remembered places, gardens, woods and night skies, developing each image from observation, casual photographs and recollection rather than from a single view.

Most of her paintings are on gessoed wood panel, many around 30 x 24 cm, alongside larger works on linen and canvas of up to 121 x 91 cm and studies on paper in ink and watercolour. Recurring subjects include trees, ponds, moonlight, polytunnels and the birds and animals seen at dusk or after dark, among them owls, nightingales, hares and moths. Her surfaces move between soft, blurred passages and sharply defined detail. Several bodies of work centre on a single site: the series Remnants of Hope (2019) and the painting A Year of Ghost Wishes record the Madron wishing tree in Cornwall, where visitors tie strips of cloth to the branches. Her titles are often long phrases, such as Where are you? (Remember the day we watched the woodpeckers) (2026).

Cobden graduated in Fine Art Painting from the University of Brighton in 1995, then lived for eleven years on Valentia Island, County Kerry, before settling in Norfolk. In 2019 and 2020 she completed the Turps Banana Correspondence Course. In 2022 she held solo exhibitions at Cane & Davis and Liliya Gallery in London and at Irving Contemporary in Oxford. Her work was selected for the John Moores Painting Prize 2020 at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2025. Her awards include second prize in the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize (2019), the Chairman’s Purchase Prize at the ING Discerning Eye (2019) and first prize in the Holt Festival Sir John Hurt Art Prize (2016). A member of The Arborealists since 2018, she co-curated the group’s exhibition Trees and the Sacred at Norwich Cathedral in 2022.