Free exhibition at Swedenborg House exploring the relationship between landscape, imagination and visionary states, with works by William Blake, F H Evans and Francis Oliver Finch.
Visionary Landscapes is running at Swedenborg House in Bloomsbury from 2 October to 16 December 2026. It's an exhibition curated by the museum's director, Stephen McNeilly, that looks at the relationship between landscape, imagination and visionary states, putting historic works in conversation with contemporary painting, photography and film.
One of the main reasons for the show is to get some of the Swedenborg Collection's new acquisitions out on the walls, including pieces by William Blake, F H Evans and Francis Oliver Finch. Around those, the exhibition pulls in questions of representation, symbolism, climate, environment, memory and place. It's less about landscape as a view and more about how we imagine it.
McNeilly's take is that for artists like Blake, Finch and the surrealist Malcolm de Chazal, there's a perfect alignment between the inner landscape of consciousness and the laws of nature. He suggests we re-evaluate landscape as a constructed internal state, and nature as a threshold between the visible and invisible realms. It's a bit of a shift in perspective: instead of looking out at the world, you're looking at how the world is mirrored inside.
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Beyond the walls, the exhibition is accompanied by public events, screenings and a book launch. It's free to enter, and it runs for over two months, so there's plenty of time to fit it in. You'll find it at Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH, from 2 October to 16 December.
