Over the last few months, I have loved being able to explore the sensual weavings and felt work of textile artist Sue Marsden, and the flowing landscapes of painter, Sophie Parr in articles for Frodsham Nub News.

This month, Sue and Sophie have come together to present their new Castle Park Arts Centre exhibition, Our Shifting Landscape.

A year in the life of the Cheshire plain

Although they both focus on the woods and hills, the berries and bracken of our corner of Cheshire, Sue and Sophie evoke these scenes through their own personal gaze, lending a fresh perspective to the landscapes we know so well.

Sue and Sophie worked on their pieces independently, and only realised when they hung the exhibition together that their work revolves around the same subject.

Both drew inspiration from their daily lockdown walks around the Cheshire countryside, with Sue exploring the Comberbach area and Sophie wandering through the woodlands of the Sandstone Ridge.

So, although they were miles apart, they found that each day they had been gazing out towards the same landscapes.

Throughout the exhibition, traces of this unexpectedly shared focus reveal themselves in the colours and contours of Sue and Sophie's work.

For example, while arranging their pieces last week, Sue found that she had used the exact same shade of green in one of her weavings as Sophie had in 'Thistles and Yellow Flowers', helping to create a thread of colour which ripples around the room, drawing together the contrasting styles of each artist.

As we move from one piece to another, we also drift across different moments and seasons, plotting a landscape advancing through its yearly birth and death, from the emerald greens of spring to the "low, bright suns" of autumn mornings.

These images, while shaped by the weather and the light and the time of day, are also inflected by the see-sawing emotion of the past year.

"The exhibition has evolved over the course of the last 12 months," Sophie says, with Sue adding: "and that word, 'evolve' is very important because the joy of it is in the process."

"Recent times have given us the opportunity to pause and take the time to look closer to home," Sophie says, "returning repeatedly to the same places and observing the landscape in that moment. Witnessing the subtle effects created by changing seasons.

"Lockdown gave me the time to appreciate my surroundings without the distraction of other complicating factors."

"So while it was a constraint on our activity," Sue adds, "it opened up new opportunities within our local landscapes.

"I found endless inspiration in the mysterious beauty of nature and the amazing grandeur of the varied landscape in my immediate locality.

"I noticed many details in my surroundings that I had not noticed before."

As well as opening their minds to new subjects, Sue and Sophie tell me that the limitations of lockdown also pushed them to test out new techniques.

"The more you see the more you see," says Sophie, "and that would make me think: "Right. What am I going to do? What am I going to respond to?""

"I hope that each piece looks enjoyed," Sue says. "I hope that people can see the feeling that we have when we finish something that has become part of us. We were both smiling as we hung the exhibition and we're excited to show it off!"

'Cheshire Landscape'

Sophie and I agree that our favourite of Sue's pieces is her 'Cheshire Landscape' series, in which woven "slices of the landscape" hang from old boot-making tools.

"These nails and screws are beautiful objects in their own right," says Sue, "and it's nice to be able to repurpose them."

In these tools, Sue offers a subtle link to the walking boots that take her up over the hilltops and down into the bog of low-lying stretching fields, so creating a tangible trace of her presence within these landscapes.

And from these simple treasures, all the riches of sky and grass unfurl in weavings of cotton and silk, complete with freely hanging tendrils of unruly roots and weeds.

Through this subtle touch, although ostensibly limiting her focus to neat "slices" of the landscape, Sue evokes a sense of nature's boundlessness, of the fields and woods that constantly exceed the frames we might impose upon them.

'Fence and Flowers'

Talking of frames, some of Sue's most intriguing pieces are her 'Fence and Flowers' linen weavings, in which the sterile straight lines of manmade gates and boundaries are disrupted by bright bursts of plant life.

"As an artist you're using a language to describe what you are seeing," Sue says, "and I was interested in representing all the verticals and horizontals that you come across within the landscape."

In the angular intersections of these textiles, we see the uneasy cohabitation of two worlds, one that curbs and restricts, the other that surges and spills out, ungovernable.

'Hawthorn in Flower'

This jostling of wills is presented more literally in Sophie's 'Hawthorn in Flower', which is one of Sue's favourite pieces.

In this painting, the white blossom of a tangled hedgerow pushes against its metal fencing, overflowing man's feeble attempt at containment in sprays of burgeoning petals and leaves.

"I love the blue of the sky," Sue says, "it's just joyous. For me, that is happiness!"

The close focus of 'Hawthorn in Flower' contrasts beautifully with Sophie's sweeping watercolour landscapes, which include 'Stroll through Moss Wood' and 'Pockets of Open Space'.

"In these paintings I was always trying to retain the freshness of the landscape," Sophie explains. "Acrylics you can paint over, but watercolours are so easily overdone, and so, I had to learn to stop working before it was too late!"

These pieces, set in the ancient heath land of Bickerton Hill and the sheer slopes of Rawhead, explore the brittle mauves of winter heather, the glowing green of leaves in spring sunshine, the muted stretch of fields on misty autumn mornings.

Here, Sophie captures the spiky detail of the forest with all the soft serenity of watercolour, creating a sense of landscapes frozen in the velvety light of dawn and dusk, hinging onto another day or night.

You can find out more about the [I]Our Shifting Landscape exhibition on the Castle Park Arts Centre website.[.I]