Come Stare She Makes A Gesture

A solo exhibition comprising nine paintings that examined the history of painting and constructions of place through a system of pairings. Titles including Berkeley (after D), Tamalpais (for E), Bell and Lily (after J) established dialogues between artists, writers and landscapes, using naming as a way to connect biography, memory and painterly lineage.

Works such as Bell and Lily brought together references to Vanessa Bell and the fictional figure Lily from Run, River by Joan Didion, exploring domesticity, interiority and the expansive possibilities of gesture. Berkeley and Tamalpais considered place and displacement through associations spanning Richard Diebenkorn to Henri Matisse, Etel Adnan to Paul Cézanne. Across the exhibition, Northern California functioned as both a remembered geography and a site through which abstraction could hold personal and historical narratives.

The exhibition title, drawn from an earlier performance work, invoked women’s positions within painting history and the material language of gesture, including associations with Helen Frankenthaler. The project extended beyond the gallery through a subsequent in-conversation with curator Pryiesh Mistry at the National Gallery on Cézanne, Adnan and Teplin’s practice, alongside a commissioned live performance staged before Portrait of Eva Gonzalès.