JILL Pemberton’s first solo exhibition in five years is a seductive voyage into another culture.

Running at the Brewery until July, Scissors Paper Stone sees Jill back in the visual arts spotlight following her successful Chair show at the Kendal arts centre in 2006.

One of the region’s most established creators, she says the exhibition is a response to a journey in China during 2011.

“This exhibition reflects my realisation that the world is no longer Western and that China especially is not a nation state but a civilisation state,” explains the former university lecturer and co-founder of Kendal’s Green Door artists collective.

“It lives in, and with, its past, in a way that I am struggling to understand. I have tried to explore this learning process visually. It’s my way of making some sense of a 21st Century challenge which impacts on us all.”

Jill’s images are post-abstract where a recognisable form emerges, vibrant and bursting with colour and texture.

She adds: “Three outstanding images obsessed and stayed with me and have permeated my sketchbooks and paintings.

“First, the timeless limestone Karst mountains of the south of China with their impossible, beautiful lyrical shapes. They remain steadfast and unchanged and are the source of landscapes which we recognise as ‘typically’ Chinese and which have been drawn and painted for centuries by skilled artists.

“The second images are the thousands of high-rise dwellings of the industrial east seen emerging through an all embracing smog, which seems to hide the sun and flatten the perspective.

“The third stem from the traditional folk-tale paper cuts which I collected. I was fascinated by the complexity and delicacy of the designs made in the traditional red paper.”

Jill’s collection is her interpretation of the essence of those three images meeting through paper, montage, clay and paint.

Particularly brilliant is the way she has captured what she describes as “the new Chinese landscape” that is punctuated by bridges, power stations and pylons.

One of her standout pieces is City Lights and Storm - a cinematic-toned cityscape engulfed in a malestrom of swirling colour.