The British-American painter Nancy Cadogan is known for her figurative works, landscapes and portraits that engage with literature and ideas about time. The Lost Trees is Cadogan’s latest solo exhibition and her first at the Garden Museum, an emotional body of new paintings created after Cadogan witnessed the falling of trees in her neighbourhood and charts the impact on the surroundings and the community.

Cadogan, who lives in London with her family, experienced the felling of forests firsthand when development for phase one of the HS2 project began, due to connect London with Birmingham. ‘I was struck by an extraordinary intensity of emotion and grief surrounding the felling of the trees, and a feeling of powerlessness that accompanied this,’ Cadogan explained in an interview with Tatler.

The paintings of The Lost Trees explore grief, loss and the personal stories Cadogan encountered, exploring more broadly, the close connections between people and nature. The paintings stand as witness, but also memory and memorial for the trees now no longer standing in parks and private gardens, felled for a number of reasons. It’s a revealing and moving show that is a reminder of how indebted we are to the environment – even in urban contexts.