Strata is a series of mixed-media works made from natural pigments, earth, mineral powders, acrylic mediums, wax and oil — substances that carry the geological logic of the landscape in their physical composition. The process of making them is slow and repetitive: layer upon layer applied, pressed, etched and scraped away.

Time is built into the surface in the same way that time is built into rock strata, into soil. It is the sensation of nature that drives the work: The smell of soil after rain; The weight of a sky before it breaks; The way light transforms the perception of a place entirely from one hour to the next. These paintings try to hold both — the geological and the atmospheric — in the same surface.

The dense, compressed lower zones and the more open, light-holding upper zones in these works are drawn from that same doubled awareness: ground and sky, depth and surface, the slow time of strata and the fleeting time of weather.

All works 2026. Available for acquisition — enquiries welcome → kristienring.com/acquisition-enquiries

What it feels like to be in a place it at a particular moment is the source of my inspiration. The quality of light as it transforms the surface of a field. The way wind makes the landscape restless, legible only in movement. The smell of turned earth or dry grass that arrives before anything is seen. The slow shift of colour as the hour changes.

These are paintings of the conditions that make a place momentarily itself — the natural conditions that alter perception, that make the same valley or coastline feel entirely different from one hour to the next. The starting point is always a specific sensory experience, a moment of acute attention.

In the studio, that experience is translated into material process. Layers of papers, natural pigment, wax, and arcylic are built up, scraped back, reworked. What remains is a record of an encounter and the experience of the place.
All works 2026. Available — enquiries welcome → kristienring.com/acquisition-enquiries

Acrylic combined with natural pigments, papers, wax, earth and mineral powders becomes less a paint and more a building material: something to layer, press, scratch into, work back. The surface accumulates decisions rather than recording a single gesture — each layer altering what came before, and in turn altered by what follows.

These works sit at the intersection of painting and materiality. The process is closer to geology than to traditional painting: time is embedded in the surface itself, visible to anyone who looks closely. In this way the medium and the subject are the same thing — both are about accumulation, erosion, the slow transformation of material over time.

This is also the medium where the connection between studio practice and permaculture work is most directly expressed. The same sustained attention to ground, to layer, to what lies beneath the surface, runs through both.

Enquiries welcome → kristienring.com/acquisition-enquiries