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 Medieval Way of Seeing (by Rose Strang, 2026)

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 (1947 lecture “Physics in the Contemporary World”.)

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

This was the challenge presented to everyone who took part in a contemplative journey to Luffness in June 2024.

The medieval mind operated with a fundamentally different framework to ours. It integrated layers of reality, perception, and imagination: 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 within overall harmony. This is exemplified in medieval cosmological thought and in their application of cosmological symbolism to interpret the material and spiritual worlds.

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 co-existing peaceable realities, as indeed these forces co-exist today.

Dante described Purgatory’s valley, where emeralds, split open, might fade against the almost unbearably luminous grass. Six centuries later Rutherford, Cockcroft and Walton were credited with splitting the atom. Oppenheimer then developed this into the atom bomb, subsequently observing that ‘knowledge of sin’ cannot be lost. How can we, all of us, navigate threshold states between the desire to know more, to control, and to refrain?  

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 ‘the cloud of unknowing’. They embraced paradox.

Our rejection of the medieval view of the universe has diminished our capacity to understand ideas as interconnected, layered, or able to exist in parallel.

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 begin to understand what the physicist’s “knowledge of sin” might mean: technologies of destruction, power without wisdom.

These ideas become material in the ‘threshold trilogy’, which embodies this tension. Created following winter visits to the friary at Luffness, it explores the opposing forces of historical violence and spiritual seeking.

In one painting a wraithlike figure emerges from catastrophe , hovering above charred remains. The faint presence of David de Lindsay (the figure commemorated by the stone effigy at Luffness Friary) hovers in liminal blue depths, imagining home while he dies from battle wounds in the Egyptian Crusades of the thirteenth century.

These works explore unpalatable contradictions, witnessing complexity: crusader as perpetrator and penitent, Christianity as instrument of conquest and aspiration towards grace. When we perceive only one dimension of reality at a time, we no longer navigate paradox or recognise that multiple truths might 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.

An 800-year-old crusader effigy matters because 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 adopt crusader imagery, they enable fragmented thinking by taking a symbol and flattening it to single meaning, stripping away the complexity that the medieval world embraced. Recovering more complex ways of knowing is essential, if we are to understand the reductionist thinking that feeds fundamentalist beliefs and cynicism.

David de Lindsay‘s motivations towards fighting in the crusades, or founding a friary and seeking redemption, cannot be understood through contemporary either/or thinking. The Forest of Luffness paintings document the pilgrimage to this effigy with Richard Demarco, whose lifelong philosophy embodies this medieval integrative approach. In these paintings, figures remain deliberately small within the cathedral-like forest, dwarfed by something larger than themselves – whether nature, mystery or the weight of the past.

Traces – What Remains? demonstrates this medieval capacity to perceive multiple dimensions simultaneously. The forest paintings show intergenerational pilgrimage just as Traces, the documentary film, captures Richard Demarco at 93 and the youngest member of the group – baby Atlas (the son of Strang’s niece, Emma, and her partner, Manuel who created the documentary, Traces).

During the day at Luffness Richard asked the new parents; “Will you tell Atlas about me?” In the documentary Richard and Atlas alone look directly at the camera. Breaking the fourth wall, they seem to ask the viewer a question.

Time becomes symphonic: the 800-year-old effigy, Demarco’s enduring memory of post-war Europe and the friary’s broken arch which stands as the project’s central symbol of our fractured present, divisions weaponised and entrenched.  Yet the act of walking there together and of paying attention to what remains, enacts a medieval way of seeing: meaning as layered, relational, empathic and sustained through shared acts of attention.

Rose Strang 2026

 

Quotes

Oppenheimer, J.R., 1947. Physics in the Contemporary World. Available at: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00007996 

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto VII, quoted in Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. InterVarsity Press, 2022), page 50.

Bibliography

Lewis, C. S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, repr.2013

Ward, Michael. Planet Narnia. The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. Oxford University Press. 2008.

Baxter, Jason M. The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. InterVarsity Press, 2022.

 

 

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

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