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.
PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
A constellation of things: spending a lot of time exploring the woods at a very formative age, being in a community with a rich oral storytelling tradition, and an obsession with oil paint. At university I spent a lot of time reading poetry, and wrote a dissertation on Dart by Alice Oswald, a book length poem made up of a tapestry of voices, human, mythic and organic. I grew up by the Dart and this way of understanding place as porous, with history just beneath the surface and the non-human bursting at the seams of our interventions has massively influenced my work.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
I always try and read a chapter to start my day in the studio, at the moment it’s ‘The Nude: a Study in Ideal Form’ by Kennith Clark and ‘Medieval Life and Leisure in the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries’ by Linda Woolley. I am often layering art history and artefacts in my work and want to grow my visual library as much a possible. The painting process is fast and slow - I’ll always have multiple boards and canvases on the go - layering colour and texture, sometimes works will sit for months or years in a corner and then suddenly I can see the next layer. I often start with a plan that always flies out the window as soon as a work is started, I am learning to be more open to the intervention the painting makes in the process, it will tell me what it wants if I give it time.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
That the world is strange and slippery, that the past and our sense of history is an illusion made of fragments, half-glimpsed and unknowable.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
An almost impossible question to answer! Stuck between Paula Rego, Caravaggio and Ana Mendieta…. Perhaps all three but it would probably be carnage.