COLCHESTER.- Firstsite’s galleries become an immersive landscape of paint, architecture and sensory experience in the Essex artist’s largest exhibition to date.

From October 2026, visitors can step inside a giant painting as Frinton-based artist Simon Carter transforms Firstsite’s galleries into a multidimensional environment of painting, architecture and sound.

Titled From the Landscape, the exhibition brings together paintings and drawings made since 2020 alongside an early watercolour, made more than 40 years ago at the age of 23. The exhibition also includes three new series of paintings created especially for the exhibition.

Carter’s practice is rooted in decades of walking, drawing and sustained observation of the Essex landscape, but his work is not landscape painting in the traditional sense. Through paint, Carter explores the act of looking, with layers of colour and texture built up over months and sometimes years. Traces of specific places, plants, vistas and feelings become held within the surface of each work, echoing the layers of rocks, soils, water and plants that make up the land itself. In this way, painting moves beyond representation to become a landscape of its own.

During an extended installation period, Carter will create a constructed landscape within the galleries, reshaping the space to create new ways of moving through and experiencing the work. New architectural features will include several monolithic ‘groyne’ walls that echo structures found along Essex’s expansive coastline.

Carter will paint directly onto the gallery walls, responding to Firstsite’s architecture, light and atmosphere, to bring the Essex landscape indoors. Existing and brand-new works will be placed over these newly painted surfaces, layering paint, process and memory.





Parts of the installation will be open to audiences as it develops, offering the rare opportunity to see Carter and the artists helping to create the exhibition at work, and to watch the work evolve as each decision, revision and gesture becomes part of the artwork.

The result will be a hand-painted environment that visitors can walk through, explore and experience from within. The galleries become landscape, the walls become canvas, and the boundary between artwork and environment dissolves.

One of the largest interventions will be a 19-metre ‘groyne’ wall carrying 500 monochrome ‘painted sketches’, conceived as a single monumental work. The sketches move across the wall with the force of a gust of wind, gathering in intensity at the centre of the exhibition like leaves caught in the branches of a fallen tree or debris brought in on a storm tide.

The new works created for From the Landscape are among Carter’s most ambitious to date. Quiet in scale, they are among his most minimal evocations of place and his individual experience of the landscape in which he has lived his entire life. At times intimate and sheltered in mood, they are elsewhere exuberant in their exploration of texture, mark-making and colour.

A specially created soundscape, built from recordings of the coastal Essex landscape made by Carter during his daily walks, further blurs the boundary between inside and outside. Together, sound, colour and space invite audiences to experience painting not simply as an image, but as a landscape to navigate, explore and discover.

Multiple entrances and exits, and carefully framed viewpoints inspired by the bird hides and pillboxes found across the Essex landscape, mean that visitors can choose their own route through the galleries, wandering, pausing and looking again. Shifting viewpoints, changing sightlines and moments of concealment and revelation echo the experience of moving through a landscape.

From the Landscape invites visitors to rediscover painting and the landscapes of Essex from new perspectives.

Sally Shaw MBE, Director of Firstsite, says: “Simon Carter has been quietly and carefully mapping the landscape of Essex for over four decades. His remarkable paintings should be enjoyed and celebrated nationally and internationally for their unpretentious dedication to the craft of painting, their love of landscape and their devotion to the simple yet important practice of looking at the world with close and respectful attention.

“This exhibition is a must-see for those who feel they know Simon’s work, as well as those who have not yet heard of him. From the Landscape is a rare opportunity to experience his practice in a new way, as painting, architecture and landscape come together across Firstsite’s galleries. Simon’s paintings are a timely reminder to us all to slow down and appreciate the extraordinary world in which we exist – wherever that may be.”