This page features larger-scale projects upcoming and past

2025/2026

Traces –  What Remains?

Traces – What Remains is a project in development, featuring paintings by Rose Strang and a film documentary by Manuel Pennuto.

Film documentary trailer: 

(Please subscribe to this blog to stay updated on Traces as we develop the project towards public screening and exhibition)

Paintings and film document a shared pilgrimage with Prof. Richard Demarco CBE., Terry Ann Newman (Deputy Director of the Demarco Trust), family and friends, to the ruins of a Carmelite Friary in June 2024, on a day of luminous beauty and profound meaning.

Within the ruined friary a worn stone sculpture is discovered; the eight-hundred year old effigy of a crusader. Contemplating such an image recalls the tragedy of ongoing war in the Middle East.  

Traces – What Remains? explores the challenges we face when exploring complex subject matter at a time when debate seems to be increasingly polarised. How might artists address that fragmentation?

An interview with Richard Demarco is central to the film, exploring themes of the project. As Richard explains himself, his physical reality at the age of 95 meant that he struggled to walk to the site. Viewers are invited to contemplate why we chose to visit this particular site, and what we can learn from the past.

The following piece by Rose Strang explores ideas that informed the project.

The Medieval Way of Seeing

“Gold and fine silver, carmine and leaded white, indigo, lignite bright and clear, an emerald after it has just been split, placed in that dell would see their brightness fade against the colours of the grass and flowers.”

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto VII

“In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Why does an 800-year-old crusader effigy matter now? What can the medieval way of understanding the cosmos offer our fragmented present?

The medieval mind operated with a fundamentally different framework than our own. They integrated layers of reality, perception, and imagination simultaneously: a thing could be matter and meaning, physical and symbolic, particular and universal. The medieval worldview saw reality as symphonic – a synthesis where all is connected in overall harmony.

That the Medieval era also saw acts of terrible violence overshadows this harmonious view of the cosmos. Extensive evidence of brutality has perhaps come to represent the medieval past more than the visions that characterised peaceable realities that co-existed, as indeed these forces co-exist today.

The medieval belief was this: life is best understood not solely through intellect but through the whole spectrum of human response. Science offers facts; the medieval mind accepted facts alongside unknowing – they embraced paradox.

What has been lost in our rejection of the medieval view of the universe and the world we live in?

We have lost this faculty of perception. Contemporary education trains us to see one layer at a time: the scientist sees cells, the economist resources, the tourist scenery. We fragment knowledge into competing specialisations, each claiming exclusive truth, creating a selective amnesia, and an inability to integrate complexity. When science operates on materialist grounds alone, divorced from ethical dimension, we arrive at the physicist’s “knowledge of sin”: technologies of mass destruction, power without wisdom.

Consequences result from this fragmentation. When we perceive just one dimension of reality at a time, we can no longer navigate paradox or recognise that multiple truths coexist without contradiction. We lose the integrative thinking that prevents us reducing complexity into simplistic binaries. In an era of intensifying polarisation – political, cultural, epistemological – this loss is profound.

This is why an 800-year-old crusader effigy matters: it embodies the very complexity we’ve lost. The medieval crusades were brutal exercises of power, yet the medieval mind also gave us the ability to synthesise different ways of understanding the world.

When contemporary extremists co-opt crusader imagery, they are doing exactly what fragmented thinking enables: taking a symbol and flattening it to single meaning, stripping away the complexity that the medieval world embraced. The recovery of integrative ways of knowing is not nostalgic – it is essential if we are to resist the reductionism that feeds both fundamentalism and cynicism.

Traces – What Remains? demonstrates this medieval capacity to perceive multiple dimensions simultaneously: past and present, the history of ideas, biological process, and the quality of attention itself. The medievalists perceived time as a poetic representation of eternity: an eternally evolving cycle of seasons, birth and death.

The broken arch in Traces – What Remains? stands as the project’s central symbol: our fractured present, divisions weaponised and entrenched. The question is whether repair is possible – whether we possess the integrative thinking and collective will to rebuild what has been broken. What remains is the question itself.

Rose Strang 2026

All paintings from the series below …

Threshold

Pilgrimage

 

2021 -2025

 

The Living Mountain

A stunning series of images – a symphony of subtle essences ***** Giles Sutherland The Times

In December 2020 I was commissioned by The Folio Society London to create a series of seven paintings to illustrate their new publication of Scotland’s iconic classic of landscape literature; The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd.

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, published by the Folio Society 2021

The series was on exhibition in 2023 at the following galleries …

The Scottish Poetry Library

The Heriot Gallery

The series will also be showing as part of The Braemar Literary Festival 2025.

Details Here

Watch video: The Living Mountain. Dreaming a Response

2019

Planet Narnia – exhibition and event

Below; the Planets Series.

Planet Narnia. The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis

The paintings above take inspiration from the planets as understood in Medieval cosmology and imagination, and the seven books of Narnia which were each inspired by the seven planets (as discovered by Michael Ward, author of  ‘Planet Narnia. The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis’.)

Exhibition and Talk at Demarco Galleries, Summerhall, Edinburgh 2019.

The paintings were exhibited at the Demarco Gallery, Summerhall, Edinburgh in September 2019, and the exhibition launch was accompanied by a talk by Michael Ward

More info about the exhibition: Planets Series

Below; photos of the related talk at the Demarco Galleries, Summerhall 2019