Nancy Cadogan is getting her hands dirty.
That isn’t unusual for someone who draws and paints every day — but this latest dirt is real, dug from the ground in Yorkshire and Warwickshire, England, and used as the medium for her drawings of trees and landscapes.
“I didn’t even know soil could stick or spread — but I love it. You make these drawings with the breath. You rub in the soil, blow the paper and then the glory reveals itself,” says the artist, who’s been keeping small buckets of dirt around her basement studio, which is a short walk from Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament in London.
“It’s physical work, because you’re clambering over the drawing [on the floor] and it’s weirdly organic. I don’t know quite what I’m doing, although I’m having a fun time,” adds Cadogan, who’s dressed in work gear — jeans and Birkenstock Bostons — with her buttery blond hair tied in a messy bun.
Cadogan comes from a family that knows dirt can be full of treasure. Nancy’s British father, Gerald Cadogan, is an academic and archaeologist, and much of her childhood was spent on excavation sites in Cyprus and Crete. Her American mother, the writer Lucy Cadogan, wrote a novel in the ’80s called “Digging,” a thriller set in Crete.
In addition to those buckets of dirt, there are palettes of paint, pieces of charcoal and stacks of books scattered all around the studio, along with paintings on easels and drawings assembled on the floor, ready for delivery to various galleries and shows.
Cadogan’s moody, smudgy brown landscapes, which she traces with charcoal or graphite and fills in with raw earth, will feature in two upcoming shows in what promises to be a frenetic few months for the artist.
The first, “The Lost Trees,” runs until Nov. 22 at Compton Verney, a vast art space in Warwickshire, England, on the grounds of an 18th-century home designed by the neoclassical architect Robert Adam, with gardens by Capability Brown. The show is the latest in Cadogan’s “Lost Trees” series, which features paintings of trees, real and imaginary, that have been felled for all sorts of reasons.
Last year, her early paintings of felled trees went on display at The Garden Museum in London. The paintings focused on the old yews, black pines and oaks that had been chopped down to make way for HS2, the U.K. government-funded high-speed railway that will cut north-south between the county of Staffordshire and London, with a branch to Birmingham.
For this year’s show at Compton Verney, Cadogan has taken inspiration from British people who’ve written to her about losing beloved trees in their own gardens, or public spaces. She also drew trees from history, including the mulberry that William Shakespeare planted in his garden, and from her own imagination.
“We have a private relationship with trees. They are beacons of time, we mark our lives by them, and we tell our private stories to them. They’re like a confessional box. We go to them to put things into perspective, and to find space, and they take on this beneficent presence,” says Cadogan.
She is persisting with the tree project because she wants to “illustrate people’s stories. One tree can be so much to so many people. A tree is a life force and an ecosystem for bugs and insects, but it’s often an emotional ecosystem for the people living around it,” says Cadogan, who specializes in portraits and landscapes and has exhibited internationally.
Abi Viner, who curated “The Lost Trees,” says one of the most powerful aspects of Cadogan’s work is “how she incorporates human emotion into landscape. This ability to tell stories and use paint to reflect emotion is one of the elements that make her work distinctive and interesting.”
Cadogan’s second big show this fall, “At the Bend in the River,” is taking place at Beningbrough, North Yorkshire, a stately home on the River Ouse that’s now owned by the National Trust. That show, which runs until April 4, 2027, also looks at humans’ relationship with the natural world.
Works on show range from Cadogan’s portraits of imaginary women to the house’s river and woodland walk, its historic gardens, tree-lined avenues, formal gardens and more recent Mediterranean plantings.
Cadogan, a poetry lover, also worked with Laura Turner, creative producer at Beningbrough, to bring in a writer-in-residence. Kathryn Tann has drawn inspiration from Cadogan’s work and the landscape at Beningbrough to create new work and lead public programs during the exhibition.
There’s more: Cadogan and Turner have also worked on an audio-chair installation, an armchair with embedded speakers that plays poems by W.H. Auden (one of the painter’s favorites) to guests at the show. Cadogan says she’s been eager to have an audio element to her shows for a while.
“It helps people in the way as music does. It helps [calm] the distracted mind, and helps people to focus,” she says, adding her choice of Auden was an easy one. “He’s a master of the human condition.”
Cadogan says her portraits and landscapes all have “a meditative quality” to them. She loved painting the River Ouse because “when you stand next to a flowing river, you feel very stationary. It’s different from the sea, because a river flows past you.”
Turner, who also curated the Beningbrough show, describes Cadogan as “an incredible colorist, and her expressive use of color and bold palette are joyous. I love the celebration of the River Ouse, which winds through the landscape around the Hall, and the amazing ‘big’ skies,” in her paintings.
Cadogan has been experimenting in other ways too — and not just with dirt. Her approach to painting has changed, and her works have become “more glazed and more drippy. They let the viewer in, and give an interesting energy to the work,” she says.
Although it’s set to be a busy fall, and spring 2027, when she’ll have a show of portraits at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, Cadogan is brimming with ideas. “One of the things I would love to do at some point is an exhibition with my dad. I’d love to do it in Greece, as a show of works in conversation with archaeology,” she says.
Art and archaeology, she argues, “are the same because people want the same things. They want security, they want their family, and the people they love, to be safe. They want health, peace, love — and they don’t want to be lonely. That doesn’t change. It’s the same through the ages.”