Inside the Painting: Under The Dome by Clare Woods
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There is a Victorian glasshouse at Kew Gardens in southwest London that is home to some of the most threatened plants on earth. The Temperate House - the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world - was built in stages between 1860 and 1899. Inside it, at a careful, controlled temperature, live species that have disappeared entirely from their original habitats. The Chilean wine palm, the only known specimen of the Saint Helena olive, the Café Marron from Rodrigues Island. Plants kept alive by architecture, by deliberate human intervention, by glass and iron and careful tending.
Clare Woods went there with a camera. What she brought back became Under The Dome.
The painting
Under The Dome (2024) is monumental - 300 × 200 centimetres of oil on aluminium, the largest work in Woods’ current exhibition Garden Without Seasons at Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing. The composition positions the viewer inside the glasshouse, amongst dense tropical vegetation, looking upward toward the spiral Victorian staircase that rises through the canopy. Lush, layered, almost overwhelming. Greens dissolving into deeper greens, the iron architecture visible through the leaves like ribs beneath skin.
Woods works in oil on aluminium - a choice that matters. Aluminium does not absorb paint the way canvas or board does. The oil sits on the surface, fluid, reflective, wet-looking even when dry. This gives her paintings a particular quality: they look as if they are still becoming. The Temperate House’s extraordinary glass structure, in Under The Dome, seems to shimmer rather than simply to stand.
The painting was first shown at Stephen Friedman Gallery in New York before returning to London. At Pitzhanger Manor - a Regency villa designed by Sir John Soane, whose own legacy permeates the building long after his absence - Under The Dome finds an unexpectedly resonant home. One preserved architecture inside another.
The argument behind it
Woods is not making a painting about a glasshouse. She is making a painting about the distance between safety and extinction - about what it means to preserve something by removing it from the world it belongs to.
The Temperate House keeps its plants alive through control. Without the glass, without the iron, without the steady temperature, these species would simply not exist. Their survival depends entirely on enclosure. This fascinates and disturbs Woods in equal measure: the thin veneer between life and death, as the Pitzhanger exhibition notes describe it, made visible in iron and glass.
Under The Dome sits within a body of work that returns repeatedly to flowers - to their beauty and their brevity, to the way they announce mortality even as they insist on colour. Nothing Permanent (2025), whose title comes from a note accompanying flowers sent to Woods during a hospital stay, makes this explicit. But Under The Dome operates at a grander scale. These are not cut flowers wilting in a vase. These are entire species, removed from their origins, maintained by an institution, surviving on borrowed conditions.
Charlotte Mullins, writing in Country Life, described Woods’ work as offering “a painterly response to nature morte, but also - simultaneously - a transformation of the subject into a melange of abstract brushstrokes.” The still life tradition, in other words, but pulled apart. The traditional subject - flowers, vessels, time - but rendered with a freedom that leaves it open rather than concluded.
The artist
Clare Woods RA was born in Southampton in 1972 and is based in Herefordshire. She studied at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art. She has been represented by Cristea Roberts Gallery in London since the early 2000s and by Stephen Friedman Gallery in New York.
Her paintings have entered significant public and private collections including Arts Council England, the Government Art Collection, and various institutional holdings in the UK and US. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2023 - one of the distinctions the RA reserves for artists whose practice has demonstrated sustained ambition and quality over many years.
Her price range at auction reflects a developing but serious market: works at secondary market have sold between £3,000 and £18,000 depending on scale and period, with primary market prices for major new works reaching considerably higher. Under The Dome, at 300 × 200 cm, represents a significant commission-level work - the kind of painting that anchors an exhibition and a collection.
Why this painting now
Garden Without Seasons opens at Pitzhanger Manor on 29 July 2026 and runs through 8 November. Twenty-nine new and recent works. The exhibition was conceived for the building itself - Soane’s own preserved interiors provide the context for paintings about preservation, absence, and the way time moves through spaces that were designed to resist it.
For anyone in or near London this summer, it is the show most worth making time for. Not because it is spectacular - though it is - but because it asks a quiet and serious question that most painting avoids: what does it cost to keep something alive?
Under The Dome is the painting that answers it most directly. A world protected by glass, rendered in oil on the most unabsorbent surface Woods could find, in a building that has survived its own architect by nearly two centuries. Everything in it insists on continuing.
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References
Clare Woods: Garden Without Seasons - Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, London, 29 July – 8 November 2026. pitzhanger.org.uk
Clare Woods: A Kinder Time - Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York, 2024. stephenfriedman.com
Clare Woods: Garden Without Seasons - exhibition press release, New Exhibitions. newexhibitions.com
Art exhibitions to see in London in July 2026 - FLO London, July 2026. flolondon.co.uk
Charlotte Mullins, quoted in Country Life, 2026.
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