London-based fine art photographer Catherine Wingfield presents The Dreams of Lioness Blixen, a new exhibition of thirty-one photographic works curated by Katy Barron, opening 14-18 September at Gallery Eight, London.
The exhibition celebrates the natural world that profoundly shaped the Danish author Karen Blixen. Drawing on several years of research and photographic journeys through the landscapes of modern-day Kenya and Tanzania vividly described by Blixen, as well as to her home in Denmark. Wingfield’s own relationship with landscape follows a similar instinct to Blixen’s: finding in the natural world a language for memory, solitude, and emotional repair.
Aged twenty-eight, Blixen arrived in British East Africa in 1914 to marry Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke and begin a new life. Her soul was deeply moved by the extraordinary land she discovered. Yet over the next seventeen years she endured illness, war, betrayal, bankruptcy, solitude, grief and sorrow. In 1931, broken and with almost nothing left, she returned to Denmark. During the long, gloomy years that followed, her suffering slowly turned into creative energy. Guided by her remarkable gift for storytelling and inspired by the radiant memory of East Africa, she began to write Out of Africa, a carefully curated account of her years there; the crafting of a myth, and ultimately an alchemy that transformed loss into healing and meaning.
Rather than illustrating Blixen’s biography, the exhibition is conceived as a photographic dialogue with her sensibility: an imagined inner Africa as much as a physical one. Through thirty one photographic works, Wingfield responds to Blixen’s story and evokes nature’s universal power to heal. Her practice is grounded in a non-documentary approach: the work is less concerned with depicting place than with evoking an emotional and sensory experience of it.
“It was the landscapes of Kenya and Tanzania that first drew me to Karen Blixen,” says Catherine Wingfield. “Before I had delved into her story, I felt the same connection to the light, beauty and vastness of the East African land she had so loved. As I researched her life further, I became deeply moved by her capacity to wonder, her curiosity, her extraordinary courage and resilience as a woman in the face of profound suffering and loss. This exhibition is my own dialogue with that same land, exploring the possibility of transformation and re-enchantment that the natural world offers.”
The Dreams of Lioness Blixen
Catherine Wingfield
A solo exhibition of photographic works
14-18 September 2026 and then continuing online at www.catherinewingfield.photography
Gallery Eight
8 Duke Street London S1Y 6BN
The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Private View: 14 September, 6-8.30pm
Artist and Curator in Conversation with Charlotte Jansen: 15 September 6-8.30pm
Sponsored by MarGin
An Evening with Wild Survivors: 16 September 6-8.30pm
Gallery Eight
Catherine Wingfield
Information
Gallery Eight
8 Duke Street, St James, London SW1Y 6BN, Great Britain
September 14, 2026 to September 18, 2026
