Evie O’Connor - Colstoun Works

During her residency at Colstoun House in 2025, Evie O’Connor (b. 1993, Derbyshire, UK) developed a series of landscape paintings that expand her ongoing exploration of class, aspiration, and the visual codes that underpin British identity. Immersed in the farmland and historic parkland surrounding Colstoun, O’Connor turned her attention to the view—an inheritance in itself—where centuries of ownership and taste are inscribed upon the land. The works, begun in situ and later completed at her studio in Glossop, Derbyshire. ‘Colstoun Works’ is a subtle but penetrating dialogue between artist and estate, observation and possession.

Working across panel, canvas, and found objects gathered from within the house and its grounds, O’Connor binds her material practice to place. Known for her works on panel and canvas the addition of found surfaces carry traces of domestic that are recontextualised as a precious work. Her wryly titled works draw attention to the performative language of privilege, echoing the self-conscious understatement of Britain’s upper classes. Each title shifts the viewer’s relationship to the landscape depicted, revealing how even beautiful countryside scenes can be a stage upon which class and control are rehearsed.

O’Connor’s landscapes are quiet yet charged: restrained compositions of fields and hedgerows are rendered with an awareness of both their serenity and their symbolism. Her muted palette and deliberate repetition of viewpoints suggest a meditation on environment and entitlement—the persistent structures that shape what we see and value. In these works, beauty becomes inseparable from history; the landscape itself a reflection of social order and privilege as much as of nature.

At Colstoun, O’Connor refines her critique not through confrontation but through poise. The result is a series that hovers between admiration and inquiry, the pastoral and the political—a body of work that considers what it means to look upon land that has long been owned, named, and painted by others.

For information on available works and a catalogue please contact mclean@colstoun.co.uk