SIX artists present an emotional and visceral response to ideas about the North in paintings, printmaking and textile art in this exhibition in Masham.

Josie Beszant, gallery director, invited UK artists to submit work inspired by the North and was surprised by the representations of a wild, untamed, changeable place. “It made me think 'the North' is as much a state of mind as a geographical location,” she said.

Painters Lesley Birch, Catherine Morris, Gareth Buxton and Pamela Knight, printmaker Suzie MacKenzie and textile artist Valerie Wartelle live between the Derbyshire dales and far north of Scotland. Their work packs a punch in a densely hung exhibition of relatively large-scale works.

Iridescent golden sands and flashes of bright colour pop off the picture plane in Birch’s rhythmic, remembered landscapes of her homeland.

Wartelle's painterly, sensory landscapes are composed of woven and felted wool, silk and flax, sandwiched between fine sheets of fabric that make up fields and fine threads defining the land. Her palette is inspired by seasonal changes and textures of the rugged northern backdrop.

MacKenzie lives and works on the northernmost point of Scotland, but says that despite its geographical situation, the community is in no way remote or disconnected from the world at large.

"The landscape is worked for farming, industry, generating power and shows signs of having been so for thousands of years," she says.

The North for her means home, a sense of rootedness and belonging in a landscape at first glance empty but on closer looking full of the story of humankind. This is what she sets out to convey.

Rather than literal translations of landmarks or industrial heritage as one might anticipate in an exhibition with this title, there is a clear sense of shared respect and fascination with the magnitude of the North and its environmental complexities. It continues until July 3.

Sarah Mayhew Craddock