Talwyn Pengelly
Joyful tidal geometry in collage
Talwyn Pengelly is a fictional Cornish artist imagined as growing up between a family chandlery in Penzance and summer sketching trips around St Ives. Her practice turns the repeated gestures of harbour life — mooring, unloading, lifting sails, watching tide-lines climb the quay — into a personal language of circles, half-moons and balanced blocks. In dialogue with joyful post-war Cornish abstraction, she treats the sea not as scenery but as rhythm, pressure and colour. Each print feels like a tide table made celebratory: measured, musical and full of weather.
Talwyn Pengelly translates Cornish harbour life into buoyant stacks of arcs, discs, chevrons and boat-hull silhouettes, making the tide feel like a bright mechanical dance. The work is abstract but never cold: salt-air texture, hand-cut edges and sun-warmed colour keep every composition lively, coastal and human.
Inspirations
- Terry Frost's joyful post-war geometric abstraction
- St Ives modernist colour and balance
- Cornish harbour signs, buoys and boat paint
- Tide tables, moon phases and nautical charts
- Hand-cut paper collage and screenprint traditions
- Penzance, Newlyn, Mousehole and St Ives quays
Signature features
- stacked half-circles suggesting suns, moons, tide marks and boat hulls
- flat primary-colour blocks with rough paper grain and screenprint texture
- bold black or navy arcs acting as masts, ropes, harbour rails and horizons
- off-centre circular suns balanced against smaller buoy-like dots
- simple boat silhouettes reduced to triangles, crescents and trapezoids
- vertical stacks that read like tide gauges or harbour walls
- slightly misregistered layers and visible cut-paper seams
- rhythmic repetition of stripes, chevrons, discs and wave bands
4 series · 110 works.
Series by Talwyn Pengelly
Fine art editions
Maritime Geometry
54 works · Cornish harbours, boats and quays in tidal-geometry collage
Land Geometry
24 works · Cornish cliffs, headlands and mine stacks in geometric collage
Tide Abstracts
16 works · Cornish tide charts and estuary maps as abstract collage
Village Collage
16 works · Cornish rooftops and beach huts in geometric collage