Rose-Marie Caldecott is a painter based in Devon, just south of Dartmoor. She creates symbolic landscape paintings which speak about finding light in dark spaces and the power of connection. 

After graduating in 2014 with a Fine Art degree from Falmouth University, Rose-Marie went on to set up her first art studio in Oxfordshire, her home county, and began exhibiting paintings locally. Her early work combined abstract fluid techniques and formal landscape painting. Her themes centred around the human experience of the natural world, as well as the ways in which we cope with being part of a reality that is constantly in flux. 

After her move to Devon in 2020, which came in the wake of a sudden and life-altering bereavement, Rose-Marie’s paintings took a new direction. Building on her unique technical process, she started allowing her work to emerge fully through instinct. Using a painting technique similar to etching (where light is revealed by carving back through dark layers of oil paint), she found herself starting to paint pinpricks of light within dark and fluid landscapes. Both this process and the forms that manifested within the work, primarily trees and root systems, became symbolic of her experience. 

“Can we reach beyond our senses to find one another, even in the dark, when all hope feels lost…

I have been meditating on one of the key dichotomies at the heart of my human experience. Only I know what it feels like to inhabit my own life; to love that which I love, to grieve that which I have lost. No one else can know what it feels like to be in my experience. I am, in that way, alone. And yet, I am always intricately connected; to all that I can sense and all that is beyond my perception; to all that has been and to all that ever will be.  

I have begun to wonder if it’s possible to become more aware of these invisible threads; to realise that we are connected in more ways than one, that there are infinite channels of light that weave us all together. This could be a way of knowing that we are never isolated, however alone we may feel, and that we can never be truly separated. So that in the moments when our understanding of life shifts or falls away into ruin, when the picture we painted for ourselves dissolves, when suddenly we cannot tell land from sky – there will be something left for us to hold on to.

A way to navigate, gently, out from the darkness..”