THE SIT DOWN
10: XANTHE BURDETT
Xanthe Burdett’s (b. 1995) relationship to painting began long before formal training entered the picture. Growing up in rural Devon, surrounded by woods and riverbanks, she developed an early fascination with the way places hold memory — how landscapes seem to carry fragments of what has come before. At 18, during a foundation course painting in Plymouth; she didn’t want praise or to fit expectations; she wanted to push herself technically.
Following this, instead of applying to art school, Burdett chose a liberal arts style degree at Cambridge. Poetry and place became obsessions: how language can hold history, how land might possess its own agency. Throughout, she continued painting privately. After graduating, she moved to London, working in events, running art classes, even spending time as a funeral director — roles that sharpened her emotional candour and awareness of ritual. Painting in her spare hours, eventually, the pull became decisive.
Only once she felt she had pushed her technical abilities as far as she could alone did she pursue an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. At the RCA, tutors questioned her commitment to classical drawing and historically inflected imagery, but she held her ground. She did not want to abandon tradition; she wanted to stretch it.
Burdett’s practice explores the porous boundary between the human and non-human. Figures surface and dissolve into foliage, soil and shadow. Transparent bodies blur into landscape. Her compositions draw on myth, medieval tapestries, Renaissance fresco methods, and the strange formal stacking of animals and figures in historical textiles. Yet she resists literalism. Symbols — Madonna lilies, foliate heads, fragments of anachronism — are placed carefully but never explained outright. Meaning remains fluid to each viewer.
Burdett works in layers, building and removing, rubbing back with cloths, allowing thin glazes to veil and reveal. She often lets paint run, inviting moments of loss of control before returning with tiny brushes to refine minute details. Each painting becomes a story of two halves: instinctive flow and meticulous precision. She works on multiple canvases at once, turning paintings to the wall when they become too familiar, returning later to uncover what was missed.
Her works oscillate between ethereal and unsettling. She is drawn to what she describes as a theory of weirdness — something adjacent to the uncanny within the natural world. Not horror, but strangeness. A quiet disturbance that unsettles comfort and asks the viewer to look longer.
Exhibiting internationally, Burdett’s recent solo exhibition Psychopomp with Palo in New York explored the mythological figure who guides souls to the afterlife — a descent into underworld terrain where human and plant forms entwine. She is currently exhibiting in China with Double Double Gallery and their show ‘Green Wanderer’s Heart’.
Across scale and medium, her paintings continue to construct worlds where memory and myth remain in flux — static images charged with latent movement.