Lens Curated Feature
ARTIST CATHERINE WINGFIELD PRESENTS
THE DREAMS OF LIONESS BLIXEN
A LONDON EXHIBITION ON LOSS, LANDSCAPE AND REBIRTH
Catherine Wingfield. The Dreams of Lioness Blixen © All rights reserved.
Gallery Eight, 8 Duke Street, St James, London SW1Y 6BN
14- 18 September 2026
Open daily 10 am–6 pm; free and open to the public.
Private View: 14 September, 6-8.30 pm
Artist and Curator in Conversation with Charlotte Jansen: 15 September, 6- 8.30 pm
London-based fine art photographer Catherine Wingfield presents The Dreams of Lioness Blixen, a new exhibition of thirty-one photographic works curated by Katy Barron, opening 14–18 September at Gallery Eight, London. Drawing on several years of research and photographic journeys through the landscapes of modern-day Kenya and Tanzania so vividly described by Karen Blixen, alongside visits to her home in Denmark, the series explores the natural world that so profoundly shaped her life and imagination. Wingfield’s own relationship with landscape follows a similar instinct to Blixen’s: finding in the natural world a language for memory, solitude and emotional repair.
Catherine Wingfield. The Dreams of Lioness Blixen © All rights reserved.
Aged twenty-eight, Blixen arrived in British East Africa in 1914 to marry Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke and begin a new life. Her soul was deeply moved by the extraordinary land she discovered. Yet over the next seventeen years she endured illness, war, betrayal, bankruptcy, solitude, grief and sorrow. In 1931, broken and with almost nothing left, she returned to Denmark. During the long, gloomy years that followed, her suffering slowly turned into creative energy. Guided by her remarkable gift for storytelling and inspired by the radiant memory of East Africa, she began to write Out of Africa, a carefully curated account of her years there; the crafting of a myth, and ultimately an alchemy that transformed loss into healing and meaning.
Catherine Wingfield. The Dreams of Lioness Blixen © All rights reserved.
Rather than illustrating Blixen’s biography, the exhibition is conceived as a photographic dialogue with her sensibility: an imagined inner Africa as much as a physical one. Through thirty-one photographic works, Wingfield responds to Blixen’s story and evokes nature’s universal power to heal. Her practice is grounded in a non-documentary approach: the work is less concerned with depicting place than with evoking an emotional and sensory experience of it.
Catherine Wingfield. The Dreams of Lioness Blixen © All rights reserved.
Catherine Wingfield commented: “It was the landscapes of Kenya and Tanzania that first drew me to Karen Blixen. Before I had delved into her story, I felt the same connection to the light, beauty and vastness of the East African land she had so loved. As I researched her life further, I became deeply moved by her capacity to wonder, her curiosity, her extraordinary courage and resilience as a woman in the face of profound suffering and loss. This exhibition is my own dialogue with that same land, exploring the possibility of transformation and re-enchantment that the natural world offers.”
Katy Barron added, “Catherine Wingfield doesn’t retrace Karen Blixen’s Africa so much as re-read it. Her photographs are an interpretation of a text as much as a place, filtered through the conviction that landscape can hold something restorative, even redemptive. What emerges is less illustration than translation: one woman’s understanding of another’s relationship to the land, seen through the lens of healing.”
The Dreams of Lioness Blixen goes on view at Gallery Eight from 14-18 September 2026 and then continues online at www.catherinewingfield.photography. All works are available for sale.
All photographic works are printed on archival print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic.
About Catherine Wingfield
Catherine Wingfield is a London-based fine art photographer whose work explores the natural world as a source of awe, healing and spiritual wisdom. She makes images that ask us to slow down, to look, and to listen.
Born in Canada to a South Korean father and a Belgian mother, Wingfield was raised in Paris. Informed by her cross-cultural background and her early training in drawing, painting and sculpture, her photographic series emerge from literary, historical and philosophical research, creating a dialogue between the human and the elemental, the seen and the felt.
Her first monograph, SoulScapes, published in 2025, brings together photographic works that explore silence, solitude and the elemental landscape. Her work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom and France.
Website: www.catherinewingfield.photography | Instagram: @catherinewingfield_photography
About Katy Barron
Katy Barron is Director of Photo Oxford and Chair of the Board of Photofusion in Brixton. She is a photography curator and acts as agent for a number of artists and estates. Katy has been focussed on photography for the past 20 years, working with museums, festivals, galleries, collectors and artists in a variety of capacities such as curating exhibitions both in the UK and abroad, advising museums and collectors on acquisitions, running artists’ residencies and prizes and mentoring photography groups as well as writing exhibition catalogues and attending portfolio reviews in the UK and abroad. She studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Magdalen College, Oxford.
