Curated by Tom Morton

The Kingfisher’s Wing takes its title from a motif in TS Eliot’s Burnt Norton (1936), a poem that is concerned with how we might live in the present moment, when it is both haunted by our memories of the past, and is forever merging seamlessly into the future.
In the exhibition, the poem's lines are offered as a spur to thinking about the peculiar temporality of the (still, restless) painted image, and the fugitive nature of color, form and meaning. Featuring works by eleven contemporary artists, each of whom has a strong connection to Eliot’s adopted homeland of Great Britain, The Kingfisher’s Wing sequences a set of distinct painterly propositions, attending to their echoed moods and preoccupations, and to their contrapuntal play of atmospheres, imagery and themes—the way they answer “light to light”.
Across the show, we encounter figuration and abstraction, the domestic and the mythic, landscapes and dreamscapes, bodies in motion and at rest. Here and there, we glimpse traces of painting’s long history and perhaps auguries of its possible futures. What emerges is not an argument for the medium as a “still point” in a “turning world” (it belongs, inescapably, to time), but rather as a repository of present-ness, and as a realm in which the moment lingers and thickens.

Image:
Mary Ramsden
All the rest is hypothesis and dream, 2022
Oil on canvas
127 x 210 cm