Invited: Ember: Silke Weißbach, Fernando Casasempere, Mark Jackson, Rebecca Partridge, Raffael Bader

Imagine a field of glowing embers, each one contributing to a shared heat. This exhibition unites five artists from across the globe, all of whom explore the theme of transformation in their work. For some, this transformation is rooted in the very materials and methods they employ. For others, it is captured through representation — presenting an image or object that embodies reflections on change. Embracing natural processes of decay and evolution, whether in the environment or the human body, these artists also convey a humility in the face of the world’s systems, acknowledging their small yet significant agency within a much larger context.

Silke Weißbach's paintings are bodies laid bare. The colours, marks, and textures of her works resemble skin — imbued with tones of blush, and prominent veins, hot pink as if latent with desire — whilst their creation mirrors the natural cycles of growth and decay. To create the works, Weißbach pours a variety of elements — agar-agar, plant pigments, wax, pink ink, shea butter, cochineal bugs, fabric softener, PVA, and soap — onto the canvas. These materials merge to form a dense, organic world that is simultaneously nebula-like and flesh-like. For the artist, decay is not an end but a transfer of energy. She explains, "Living organisms and their inorganic counterparts depend heavily on intense flows of materials and energy. Our organic bodies are temporary manifestations within these flows: at birth, we capture a portion of this flow within our bodies, and upon death, we release it, as microorganisms transform us into new raw materials." As with the immersive nature of post-war colour field painting, Weißbach's expansive canvases lead us towards a sense of sublimity, where the distinction between us and the canvas begins to decay itself, underscoring the dynamic and interconnected nature of all matter.

Mark Jackson's painting swimmer on the international dateline, also presents a meditation on the body and selfhood. The International Date Line appears on world maps as a distinctly inorganic division that zig-zags through the Pacific Ocean. Here, a figure is pictured navigating the submerged red line, swimming in both today and yesterday at the same time. This duality — being caught in both the present and the past, or even existing ‘out of time’ — highlights the arbitrary nature of the divisions we impose on our world. It underscores how such constructs fail to capture the true complexity of lived time, and indeed reality. Jackson draws upon the insight of Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who suggested, "the map is not the territory." This painting is typical of Jackson’s work, in which philosophical ideas unfold within improvised, gestural, and richly layered canvases.

Rebecca Partridge’s paintings respond to particular locations, often over marked periods of time. She’s particularly interested in the connection between landscape and perception, brought together in depictions of natural motifs: skies, seas, mountains and tree canopies. The works range from acutely observed realist oil paintings of wildflowers at night, to large watercolours of skies — built through the application of dozens of thin washes on raw canvas, painted from memory. On first encounter, the multiplicity of these works evoke minimalism and seriality, but, on closer looking, the works imbibe a romantic, felt experience. She says of her work, “I’m interested in qualities of attention and how the act of making a painting can express an attitude towards the subject. With this in mind, my intention is, in a quiet way, to translate a sense of attention and connection to our environment.”  

Fernando Casasempere moulds clay mixed with industrial waste into bold, abstract sculpture that is both distorted and formally familiar. The resultant forms, set with fire, are marbled with the Anthropocene. Whilst the colouring may hark back to traditional blue and white porcelain, here, the conventional patterning has devolved into something more entropic, the streaks suggesting that earth and manufactured materials are no natural mix — they are but ‘distant relatives’ formally and materially. Casasempere is profoundly inspired by the Pre-Columbian art and architecture of Latin America and is particularly attuned to his native Chilean landscape — with his processes thus drawing attention to means by which that terrain has been exploited. The artist hopes the works speak of our urgent responsibility individually and collectively to change our relationship with the land now.

Raffael Bader's works suggest manifold views of the landscape. The paintings oscillate between the depiction of voluminous natural forms, such as expanses of water, mountains, verdant planes and sky, and aerial views of the terrain. In his painterly world, we’re flickering between stances — sometimes firmly planted on a lake shore, at other times psychologically transported overhead. Bader holds a certain horizontality and verticality within the same picture plane in tension, creating dreamlike configurations and contradicting formations. Despite the clearly defined interlocking shapes, the paintings convey a sense of movement and fluidity through his textured compositions, wrought in nuanced layers of oil paint and oil crayons. They teeter on the edge of representation — a plume of smoke may resemble a rocky canyon, but the fiery yellow beneath it hints otherwise. In line with several artists featured in Ember, Bader's work recalls American post-war colour field painting, particularly in this case evoking the style of Clyfford Still, where colour, texture and shapes fuse together into ‘a living spirit’.

August 2024