Lianne Mellor’s paintings start not in the studio, but deep in the soil of her Sheffield allotment. Her practice is like a slow cultivation, where growing, tending, and harvesting are inseparable from painting itself. For her exhibition, Gather, at The Bowery, she looks at the ancient, medicinal, and folkloric traditions related to plants to create compositions that act as living ‘potions’ — intricate, entangled arrangements that breathe with the energies of healing and manifestation.  ​ In this new series of works, Mellor draws on traditions where plants were understood as physical remedies and as ingredients for emotional and spiritual transformation. Researching medieval herbals, folkloric practices, and ritual uses of plants, she works with Medical Herbalist Jo Dunbar and carefully selects plants rich with symbolic meaning.  ​ In For Lovers, Mellor gathers hawthorn, angelica, and rose into a composition that feels like a memory of early summer — hedgerows tangled with blossom, the air thick and sweet. Hawthorn, the so-called ‘Bride’, sits at the heart of it all, its white flowers protective, overarching, echoing old wedding customs and the wild energy of May Day. There’s a story that during the plague, villagers would tuck angelica roots under their tongues for protection, a small act of faith in desperate times. Mellor paints Angelica leaning gently toward the hawthorn, almost as if it’s watching over it, a subtle reminder that love, too, sometimes needs shelter. Then there’s the rose, spilling softly through the arrangement. Its bloom isn’t showy, but half-open and a little shy, like a secret you’re not quite ready to share. The rose, with all its old associations — first heartbreak, comfort, the courage to hope again-doesn’t just decorate the scene; it seems to hold everything together.  For Lovers is about the small, complicated work of loving and being loved.  ​ These arrangements are envisioned as visual ‘recipes’ — talismanic arrangements designed to evoke a particular feeling, fulfil a wish, or offer protection. In Mellor’s hands, the canvas becomes both cauldron and almanac, distilling centuries of northern earth knowledge into something that enacts transformation. Central to this project is the concept of the ‘doctrine of signatures’ - the early medicinal belief that plants bear visual clues, or ‘signatures,’ hinting at the ailments they might cure. This idea, rooted in observation and analogy, held that a plant’s shape, colour, or texture revealed its healing potential. Take walnuts, for example; they were thought to benefit the brain due to their resemblance to its folds, while eyebright, with its eye-like flowers, was used for ocular complaints. By weaving together plants historically linked to immunity and protection, she acknowledges ancient ways of seeing and understanding the natural world — modes of knowledge rooted in observation, symbolism, and an intuitive relationship with nature. Her painterly approach mirrors these traditions: rather than striving for clinical realism, she privileges mood, atmosphere and reverie. Colours glow with a soft internal light; forms are both precise and slightly otherworldly, conjuring a dreamlike quality that speaks to the imaginative space of healing and transformation. In this way, Mellor’s work becomes a contemporary meditation on the doctrine of signatures: an artful acknowledgement of the enduring human impulse to seek meaning, connection, and renewal through the forms and symbols of the natural world.  ​ In For Protection, the mood shifts. Here, Mellor gathers a council of plants, elderberry, echinacea, horseradish, blackberry, and rowan, not to open the heart but to defend it. Folklore teaches that no elder tree may be cut without permission, and Mellor honours that spirit, its clusters sitting thick at the forefront of the composition. The fire of horseradish, slicing through winter sluggishness; the starburst vitality of echinacea, a radiant immune stimulant; and the humble blackberry, rich with antibacterial strength - rise above a translucent vase. The vessel's silhouette reminds one of the elegant curves of an old apothecary’s flask, quietly nodding at the spirit of the chemist and herbalist. Then, standing slightly above yet binding the assembly, the rowan berries burn bright as tiny warding fires. Interestingly, the doctrine of signatures also suggests that such immune-boosting berries arrive in abundance just as the season of coughs, colds, and flu arrives — a timely appearance that nature seems to orchestrate for our protection. Mellor paints these plants not in static portraiture but as a gathering storm of vitality and guardianship. For Protection is less a botanical study than a spell against winter fevers, foul winds, or the deeper illnesses.  Mellor’s paintings aren’t still lifes - they’re slow-lives, each brushstroke preserving the particular curve of a leaf that once shaded seedlings in her plot. The tension sings between sparse tabletops (those same teak surfaces from her studio, immortalised in recurring blue-walled backdrops) and the exuberant tangle of produce. While nodding to 17th-century Dutch vanitas, Mellor intends to subvert the memento mori tradition. Like her predecessors, she composes intimate tableaux that revel in the textures, colours, and ephemeral qualities of organic matter. But her compositions do not whisper of mortality or the futility of earthly pleasures; instead, they emphasise healing, interconnectedness, and celebration. Rather than sourcing exotic cut flowers or imported fruits, her paintings are grounded in what she has grown, marking a return to the local, the seasonal and personal. Her paintings, while meticulously arranged, carry a sense of lived experience rather than theatrical staging. A stage where she reimagines still life not as a meditation on loss, but as an affirmation of ongoing cycles of care, growth, and renewal. At a time when the pace of life can feel relentlessly fast and disconnected from the land, Lianne Mellor’s practice offers an urgent and increasingly popular proposition: that slowness, attention, and care are creative acts in themselves.