When interviewed for the Picture Post in 1949, Prunella Clough stated that she liked ‘paintings that say a small thing rather edgily’. For the next fifty years, Clough pursued her commitment to painting. Her early works included studies of dockworkers at Lowestoft harbour and labourers in factories.

Although her paintings became increasingly more abstract throughout the 1960s and 1970s, they remained rooted in the world she saw around her and informed by close attention to the urban and industrial landscape. Clough said, ‘I can locate all the ingredients of a painting in the richness of the outside world, the world of perception.’

After being diagnosed with cancer, Clough continued to paint, producing her last major series, the ‘Land’ paintings, including Disused Land in 1999, made in the year of the artist’s death. Clough would travel from her London studio down to the coast around the Portsmouth area to find inspiration in the vast sea, flat land and open sky.