Catherine Long’s practice is piqued by the physicality of paint and the poignancy and passion innate to colour but which she electrifies with searching marks that explore the sensation of gesture, rhythm and haptics. Marks that dance across her canvases, privileging experience over perception; matter over meaning, so that her surfaces eventually betray a patina of participation and resonance. Transcribed in arabesques of melodic line, drawn from the artist’s background in contemporary dance, her compositions take shape in tactile, spatial application. Motion and emotion – exteriorised then interiorised – dance together as figure and ground; line and colour; stage and antagonist.