In their second exhibition with the gallery, Goodchild and Smith present a new series of paintings and textile works, as well as their collaborative installation, Tower. Goodchild and Smith share a fascination with what lies just beyond reach- beyond consciousness. They are interested in tapping into these unknown realms, exploring themes including fate, nature's cycles, and inevitability in their work.
Margaux Smith's new paintings reflect on historically recurring natural events, including floods, celestial phenomena, fallen meteorites, and shifting seasons. These cyclical events represent the repetitive nature of time, a concept mirrored in Smith's process of creating paintings through sanding and building-up of the canvas. Heather Goodchild's elegiac paintings, which depict St. Anne's Anglican Church before and after the catastrophic fire of 2024 echo these cycles of destruction and regeneration. Both artists draw from the well of ancient mythology, weaving themes and images from the past that offer a symbolic perspective on current events.
At the center of the exhibition stands the Tower, composed of nine sides, each adorned with backlit silk paintings by Smith. Its vibrant interior is visible only in fleeting glimpses, reflected in a mirror suspended high above. Inside, the space is alive-richly coloured, theatrical, and dynamic-yet never seen directly. Tower serves as a metaphor for consciousness: we perceive its exterior, and its presentation, but the inner world can only be accessed indirectly through fragmented reflections, much like the way dreams offer glimpses into the unconscious.
Both Smith and Goodchild continually return to the natural world, drawing from the history of still-life painting as a reminder of the fleeting aspect of life. The title of the exhibition is a contemporary translation of the Greek Moirae, the trio of fates that determine the beginning, duration and end of each human life. The flowers that appear throughout the exhibition, alongside the landscapes, real and imagined, evoke the inevitability of change, death and renewal.
