With Clare Woods: Garden Without Seasons now open at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, The Wick is looking to Woolworth’s Roses, a 2023 painting of a vase of flowers that reveals far more than first meets the eye. At first, the work appears to sit within the long tradition of floral still life. Look longer, and the roses begin to carry a wider history, drawn from the seven rose bushes George Orwell planted in his garden before the Second World War.

Woods, who was elected a Royal Academician in 2022, is a British painter known for paintings that hover between recognisable image and abstraction, with forms slipping through her distinctive wet-look oil paint. In Woolworth’s Roses, the flowers are gathered indoors, their petals drooping against a darker interior. The painting offers the pleasure of colour and surface, while also carrying the knowledge that bloom is always temporary. Like Orwell’s garden, the image becomes a small act of attention in a period shadowed by war and uncertainty.

The work sits naturally within Garden Without Seasons, an exhibition of 29 new and recent paintings, collages and prints made over the last four years, in which Woods returns to flowers, still life, windows and the natural world. Shown within Sir John Soane’s former country home, Woolworth’s Roses sharpens the exhibition’s meditation on the fragile life of flowers. The vase becomes an image of beauty held briefly, all the more luminous with the knowledge that it cannot last.

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