Pioneer Succession
An Exhibition by Deborah Nagan
9th March to 9th June 2026
Pioneer Succession takes its title from a foundational concept in ecology: the process by which pioneer organisms — the first to colonise bare, disturbed, or apparently lifeless ground — transform their environment sufficiently to allow more complex communities to follow. Among the most remarkable of these pioneers are lichens, composite organisms formed from the symbiotic union of fungi and algae, capable of surviving prolonged desiccation, of metabolising rock into soil, and of persisting in conditions that defeat almost every other living thing. For Deborah Nagan, lichens are not merely subject matter but a governing metaphor — for resilience, for interdependence, and for the slow, patient work of repair. This exhibition brings together a series of abstract paintings in acrylic that trace a journey from ecological systems to emotional states, with lichen and rose as both material presence and conceptual thread.
The earlier works in the series are concerned with biodiversity and the intricate webs of relationship that sustain living landscapes. Layers of dragged and melded colour — greens bleeding into blues, ochres dissolving into greys — enact rather than depict the interconnected fabric of ecology. The paint itself behaves ecologically: pigments overlap and influence one another, no tone entirely dominant, each dependent on what surrounds it. These paintings carry an implicit argument, one shared by artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Agnes Denes, that abstraction can be a precise instrument for rendering the systemic and the invisible — the forces that hold living worlds together, and the fragility of that hold. One work, Interdependance (2026), incorporates real lichen collected during Nagan's fieldwork, pressing the boundary between representation and specimen, between painting and scientific record. Alongside the lichen works, the exhibition draws on lichen's long history as the source of litmus — the dye used to produce paper that tests for acidity or alkalinity and has entered common usage as a measure of revealed truth. Litmus as metaphor runs through these works: the idea that contact with something real — with nature, with loss, with beauty — discloses something essential about who we are and what we value.
A third strand of the exhibition is devoted to ice. Nagan has long been drawn to glacial environments — their colours, their raw and shifting beauty, the physical geography lessons they carry within them. The Ice series works across multiple mediums to explore ice as both material reality and urgent symbol. A watercolour allowed to bleed and drip through Japanese paper renders the irreversible movement of meltwater with quiet precision, the medium itself enacting what it describes. Two acrylic works use the layering of semi-translucent paint to suggest life emerging from retreating ice — organisms and ecologies released, fragile and blinking, into an altered world. A fourth, shimmering work responds to the hottest day ever recorded in Reykjavik, its luminous surface hovering between beauty and alarm. Together these paintings recall the warnings about global warming that were sounded decades ago and remain, to Nagan's deep frustration, largely unheeded. Ice, in this exhibition, is not only a subject of wonder but a measure of collective failure — a litmus, in its way, of how far we have fallen short.
Later in the exhibition, the emotional register deepens and shifts. Three works from the Roses series introduce a different kind of material intimacy. A sketch drawing made after a photograph by Cy Twombly — his characteristic attentiveness to the softness and transience of petals — is accompanied by two small paintings on canvas, one of which incorporates rose petals gathered from Nagan's own garden. These works were made with sadness: a sense of love lost, and of a futility that is at once personal and planetary — the recognition that we cannot protect the natural world from ourselves, nor our hearts from breaking. Where the lichen paintings speak of endurance and symbiosis, the rose works sit with tenderness and grief, with the beauty of things that bruise at a touch.
Pioneer Succession marks a significant moment in Nagan's practice. After four decades working as a geographer, traveller, landscape architect and maker of installations, she has placed art at the centre of her daily life, sustaining a rigorous painting and drawing practice alongside projects such as The Moss Garden on Red Kite Estate. That accumulated knowledge — of how landscapes function, of how they are read and managed and damaged — now flows directly into her visual language. Where her earlier career asked how we shape the land, this body of work asks how the land shapes, and unmakes, us.
Deborah Nagan, 2026