A TRIP to Iceland lies behind Shona MacPherson’s paintings in her Mountains Of The Mind exhibition at City Screen, York.

The York artist completed an artist-in-residency at the Icelandic Association for Visual Artists, or Samband Íslenskra Myndlistarmanna, to give it the name that locals would call it.

“I was first drawn to Iceland through seeing the work of Roni Horn, who is said to use ‘Iceland as studio and material, refuge and provocation’,” says Shona, who made a pilgrimage to Horn’s unusual piece of public art, The Library Of Water, situated on the east coast.

“My residency gave me the valuable time to develop my work and ideas relating to landscape and nature and the paradoxical human connection to it,” she adds.

Her new paintings not only make reference to the sparse and rugged Icelandic landscapes but also suggest that our romantic, escapist idea of wilderness does not always match up with the reality.

The writer Lucy Shaw has provided the exhibition text. “We forget, sometimes, the tranquillity of the earth, making it our own with visitor centres and roads, mapping out the wilderness, loudly diminishing the unknown, with footpaths and instant photographs sent as text messages home,” she writes.

“Package holidays to the frontier for every urban pioneer, while the natural landscape disappears to a future of industrial ideas. We give it smoother edges and wrap it with a bow.”

• Mountains Of The Mind is on show on City Screen’s first-floor corridor until March 8.