Even before her brush has begun to excavate any sense of territory, Abbie Horberry transforms the ground upon which she works. Canvas is deliberately and vigorously crumpled by the artist; an energetic intervention that invests into her now corrugated surface tiny rifts and valleys that seek to trap, (re)direct and discombobulate the paint she subsequently applies. Before she paints, Horberry meddles further with her canvas by dying it: a process that amplifies the disturbances she has made; her inks seeping deep into the ground, tattooing folds into scars, alienating surface materially and chromatically. This very physical process allows Horberry to mould her ground, empowering it to capture smear, spill and stain so that her first communion with the earth mandates a certain kind of mapped phenomenology. One born from the artist’s intuition as a painter, her encouraged accidentality and results in her ever-present, ever-conscious act that celebrates improvisation as much as it interrogates and tries to control it.

The wrinkles of the surface – perhaps a distant planet’s scars or the capillaries under your skin – also serve to contain this fire, offering cohesion through, ironically, a haphazard stream of lines that, in effect, function like a stream of consciousness: a thought process that, much like Horberry’s surface, eschews dimension or perspective and privileges an intertwined entanglement of mark and moment.