Scene XII: Eden

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, June 2025

Scene XII: Eden

I: NEED

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

William Blake, The Garden of Love (From Songs of Experience, published in 1794)

The Garden of Eden throbs with the most delectable brew of emotions - heaving as both parable and paradigm; sighing as sign and signifier – offering rhythms of innocence and experience that find purpose only in their polarity. ‘Eden’ is an anagram of ‘need’: a fitting logograph given that desire snakes its way through the Biblical tale of Paradise, at first illuminating the light of hope and bounty for Adam and Eve but which, ultimately, sucks them in to the shadows of dereliction and displacement. Eden thus represents the ultimate oxymoron: a space that is meant to celebrate a God-given Arcadian bliss and the supposed purity of (wo)man that inhabits it but which, instead, merely draws attention to (wo)man’s innate fallibility; a space where flowers offer no love for life but rather serve only to witness death, as Blake notes in his poem above. Eden only exists so that it may fall; sinlessness and immaculacy must genuflect to degrees of corruption. The need that beats inside the heart of Eden must grow so feral that it consumes it. It is the destiny of Paradise to transmogrify into cyphers dark and dangerous because, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we always want what we cannot have. So it is that Eden is a h(e)aven of beauty and destruction; virtue and temptation; love and punishment, with such oscillation of inclination nurturing a wobble of anxiety that has pierced humanity since time immemorial.

Scene XII: Eden brings together the work of ten artists that when seen collectively (in juxtaposition and contradistinction) proffer a journey from Paradise to Fall; from the language of abundance and joy to more sombre, challenging inflections of being, much as all gardens are blessed with flowers yet burdened by weeds. These are works that begin by exploring the ground on which temples are built, then proclaim their gardens, only to witness their inexorable decay, leaving us, finally, to mull over new paeans to presence and absence, love and loss, devotion and dislocation. Underpinning this presentation is, of course, the extraordinary political turmoil which we currently endure. Gay rights, women’s rights – indeed the whole rainbow of human rights – have all come under attack of late by various administrations who seem to believe that Paradise can only be achieved by eliminating otherness, be that recognised as sexuality, colour, (trans)gender, nationality or creed. Land (and the bounty it reaps both on and underneath it) is almost always the theatre, spoils and tragedy of war and so it is that this Scene makes explicit Eden as both promised and crenelated land. A land perfumed by light and colour, but which is just as equally rent asunder into animated, tear-gassed and rubber-bulleted abstraction. A land born of the inextricable entanglement of energies known and unknown, penning our odes to innocence and our songs of experience with equal gusto.

II: GROWTH

“And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’ And it was so.God called the dry ground ‘land’, and the gathered waters he called ‘seas’. And God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:9-10)

Sam Llewellyn-Jones, faces in hadean dreams, 2025, Oil pastel on linen, 200 x 150 cm (78 3/4 x 59 in)

Sam Llewellyn-Jones’ multifaceted practice interrogates both the act and arc of painting. Often starting with a photographic image, which he has already and very deliberately distorted in the dark room, Llewellyn-Jones creates paintings that ebb and flow between mark and memory, image and index, pressure and print. The result are gloriously ghostly abstractions that, over time, reveal the secrets of their silver-gelatine past whilst remaining resolutely and beautifully painterly as surfaces. Alongside these whippy grisailles Llewellyn-Jones also creates larger, more colourful abstract paintings which, to all intents and purposes, function as collaborations between the artist and his source; between object(ivity) and subject(ivity); between craft and chance. Faces in Hadean Dreams (2025) is the result of the artist taking sheets of linen to a beach in Hastings and placing them over rocks. He then rubs paint on the linen over those rocks to create a direct impression of its form and surface, but which is denied any further reality by the orchestration of Llewellyn-Jones’ composition. Quotations of the source commingle together in mosaics of rose, lilac and peach to evince a cordate form which, coupled with the romantic palette he employs, invests his primordial ground with a veneer of Edenic love. The artist thus records the fact of matter whilst simultaneously evincing the matter of its fact as a painting, object, performance, gesture or process. Ground – or land – hovering in that space between invention and association, issuing a (literal) geology of mark making that sets up poignant conversations between states earthly and ethereal, then and now, and their undeniable alliance.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Not every wish bears fruit, 2024-25, Etching on paper laid on canvas, 155 x 243 cm (61 x 95 5/8 in)

Theodore Ereira-Guyer also takes an interdisciplinary approach to his practice, meshing vocabularies of printmaking, sculpture and photography to encourage a new dialect of painting. His is a concept and a craft that, like the alchemist, brings to life a surface that lives not despite, but because of the deliberate demise of its previous incantations, be they technical, chemical or artful. Metal plates are firstly scratched and scarred with painterly flourishes of acid. These are generously doused in ink and plaster and then pressed and rolled against thick sheets of sumptuous paper. These etched sheets are then, in turn, translated onto plaster and cement surfaces. Whilst Ereira-Guyer employs various techniques that are centuries old, it is the conversation between the various chapters of his craft’s strategy that - both in symbiosis and contradistinction - elevates his process and his work out of the annals of art history. Not every wish bears fruit (2024-25) confronts its viewer with both familiarity and estrangement: one knows the whistles of trees and cool forest shadows and yet our experience of them here, dancing across the artist’s monumental etched surface as if propelled by some autumnal wind, is deliberately problematized by the artist’s insistence that gesture – and its flux – be at the forefront of our relationship with his surface. Land thus holds together its past with its presence, and it is this maelstrom between what is invented, forgotten and remembered that ironically feeds the artist’s rewarding choreography, unveiling a landscape bewitched by arabesques of memory and moment, agency and chance, and resulting in a ‘scape of discovery that – like time; like Eden – slowly ebbs away into haunting abandonment.

III: LIGHT

“In the Garden of Eden, there is no right or wrong, only the pursuit of pleasure and fulfilment.” (Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden, posthumously published in 1986)

Beatrice Hasell-McCosh, No Worries If Not (Part I), 2025, Oil on canvas, 132 x 122 cm (52 x 48 in)

Beatrice Hasell-McCosh, No Worries If Not (Part II), 2025, Oil on canvas, 132 x 122 cm (52 x 48 in)

Beatrice Hasell-McCosh, No Worries If Not (Part I), 2025, Oil on canvas, 132 x 122 cm (52 x 48 in)

Beatrice Hasell-McCosh, No Worries If Not (Part II), 2025, Oil on canvas, 132 x 122 cm (52 x 48 in)

Nowhere does the exuberance of Eden as blessing and bounty reveal itself more passionately in this Scene than in the work of Beatrice Hasell-McCosh. The viewer is thrown into her cornucopia of sumptuous brushwork, with each luscious lick serving to capture the energy, frivolity and complexity of the natural world. Eden is here a precious botanical wilderness, replete with exotic plants and flowers that reveal themselves in silhouette and extend to their viewer a haptic zing transmitted by the artist’s dynamic modelling and the fluidity and tempo of her lively mark making. A large diptych, No Worries If Not (Parts I and II) (2025) offers a powerful display of Hasell-McCosh’s process, where she pits the definition of botanical accuracy against the suggestion of her painterliness. It is a confrontation between observation, recollection and inspiration, in keeping with the strategies of Llewellyn-Jones and Ereira-Guyer but now blooming with a supple radiance that harmonizes her composition, with each tone pouring in and out of itself, creating depth yet delicate friction. Indeed, even as the sun shines across her landscapes, Hasell-McCosh’s diptych cannot help but mine much of the oppositional charge of Eden’s signification. The verdant, cool greenery of the second panel contrasts with the fired terracotta and fleshy peaches of the first panel, offering a reminder that for all the pleasure this garden will provide, it is the pain of unavoidable banishment that awaits its two protagonists.

Dean Fox, The Garden, 2025, Oil on canvas, 96 x 85 cm (37 3/4 x 33 1/2 in)

Eden shifts from a space of ebullience (albeit tinged with portent) to what appears to be an altogether more tranquil scene in Dean Fox’s The Garden (2025). Of course, Fox’s intimate image is equally phrased through acts of incision, interruption and incorporation, purloining quotations from the Post-Impressionist painter, Henri Lebasque and reassembling them in sharp slices across his surface. Serenity is thus derived from acts of painterly and conceptual rupture. A woman sits at a table in a garden setting, yet her delineation and characterisation wobbles with conscious uncertainty, discombobulated by an amoebic line that consistently morphs in and out of deliberate abstraction and is further challenged by lozenges of jades, emeralds and lemons that swoop into the centre stage from the upper right like a clattering of jackdaws; a contest at odds with the clear, unfettered registration of the garden chairs and table. Here, Fox’s liquid figuration and bold brushwork set a dreamier mood for Eden: a scene bathed in glorious, summery light which exhales a long, leisurely period of calm but which nonetheless never lets the viewer escape the stark reality of the storm to come, billowing in tormented tessellation in the distance.

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Balltsz, 2025, Oil on canvas, 25.5 x 30.5 cm (10 x 12 in)

Down to the woods we go to join Chris Huen Sin-kan and his dog in Balltsz (2025): a gentle yet telling composition that continues the artist’s investigation into the nature and dynamic of experience. A state that, for Huen, speaks in tenses both past and present, whispering both moment and memory as a single stream of signification and is declared in his usual montage of marks floating across his stages like flurries of synaptic snowfall. The intimacy of both scale and subject here nourishes a familiarity with which Huen can engender a fluidity of experience (his of his family and pets in specific locations) yet simultaneously inveigh against it. So it is that Huen’s dog drifts from known into unknown as he dematerialises the woods near his home in The Weald into deliciously ambiguous space: a small field of Rothko plum enlivened by capillaries of hot pink or bruises of charcoal – a palette that cannot help but be portentous. Pillars of being now shift into arcs of becoming. Who and where we are then begs the question of how we are: a subtle, gentle interrogation that Huen oversees to suspend space and transcend time, resulting in the most hypnotic surface that quivers like a dream in its precious abbreviation. Even as Eden proclaims itself as the sanctity of home, the truth here – unveiled by Huen’s dark, moody palette and his tremulous touch – is rather different. Eden is now a place of inchoate wish (fulfilment) and bruising desire; a place that survives not because of the pursuit of pleasure but because of its need to hold onto the memory of it.

IV: SHADOW

“It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1943)

Lewis Brander, Copse, 2024–25, Oil on linen, Unframed: 100 x 40 cm (39 3/8 x 15 3/4 in), Framed: 102 x 42 cm (40 1/8 x 16 1/2 in)

So, the rot begins. Quietly at first across Lewis Brander’s exquisite surface that hums with a knowing silence. Land and sky see place evaporate into soliloquies of spatial nebulosity, born from an interest in Monet’s parliamentary fog, Turner’s ancient mists and Rothko’s ethereal evanescence and which throb with the most aching sophistication. Copse (2024-25) functions not unlike a Renaissance depiction of the ‘Last Judgement’, with plumes of sunset sky drifting up and away from a clamouring ground of sage and forest greens, a dynamic which is exacerbated by the insistent verticality of Brander’s canvas. A ballet of condensation takes place here, with form elegantly massaged into simple, painterly moments of pure gesture that still evoke materially and elementally but without the need for description. The result is the transformation of Eden as the emblem of Heaven on Earth into the bifurcation of celestial and earthly realms and their reshaped tributaries of meaning. Earth now a known space that must navigate all manners of sin; Heaven now resolutely unknown, an arena that dances between the light of faith and the faith of light.

Clare Woods, Brian's Vine, 2023, Oil on aluminium, 49 x 39 cm (19 1/4 x 15 3/8 in)

Eden’s unavoidable putrescence continues as it rains from Brander’s sky down onto the once fertile earth, instigating a deliquescence of form and subsequent recalibration of meaning. What once spoke of generosity and feracity now slurps limply down the composition, with form sloughing into oleaginous passages of slickly executed paint. Clare Woods’ Brian’s Vine (2023) perfectly sums up the Sartrean angst that flows through Eden’s signification. A theatre of loss and punishment is now powerfully transformed into a contemporary Vanitas painting. Woods’ vines meander slowly across her support, generating and then enervating in various densities of pigment and speeds of touch as their ghoulish colours wend in and out of a velvety, obsidian darkness, pushing out and sucking in colour in equal measure. A tumult of form now gives way to a sophistication and penetration of composition, itself born of a most instinctive, physical approach to painting; one that sees Woods engage with paint and the weight of her brush much like the sculptor might manipulate clay. One that lights up Eden with darkness and enlivens the very act of looking by asking the viewer to contemplate a slow, seductive, irresistible slide into death.

V: KNOWLEDGE

“Farewell happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells: Hail, horrors, hail.”
(John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667)

The final transformation of Eden is its epistemological shift from terrains of the unknown to known, from the numbing comfort of innocence to the voltage of sentience.Adam and Eve only achieve their true humanity and become fully conscious because of their frailty. Their weakness could therefore be considered their strength in Eden given that their succumbing to temptation only served to open their doors of perception and become fully flawed, living humans. Innocence may have died when Eve bit that apple but, as David Bowie reminded us in Quicksand, “… knowledge comes with Death’s release.” Experience – be that understanding or guilt – thus fuels a more marked awareness of ‘the other’ and it is in this space that we turn to the final three artists of Scene XII: Eden.

James Cabaniuk, Osmosissy, 2025, Oil paint, spray paint and glitter on canvas, 120 x 130 cm (47 1/4 x 51 1/8 in)

James Cabaniuk’s dynamic canvases - body abbreviations and converations generated by energetic smears and scratches across his thickly-impasto, glittery surfaces - speak to the emotional poignancy and physical necessity still required to unveil and protect Queer Power. These loaded surfaces initially give off whiffs of Abstract Expressionism or paintings from the School of London, but inside them charged images of Queer love slowly emerge, at once diluting the presupposed artistic machoism of de Kooning or Auerbach and, instead, unveiling the artist’s strategies of Queer opacity and temporalities, further fetishizing and critiquing the power structures that assume big, bold abstraction can only be executed by heterosexual men. Terrain now skin; planar configuration now corporeal penetration. Such steady self-revelation is the foundation for Cabaniuk’s Osmosissy (2025). Here they have returned to the earth of now fallen Eden and sprinkled their fairy dust (a combination of oil, spray paint and glitter) across that barren land, sowing the seeds for a new appreciation of it. Through personal experience and a great sensitivity for both the praxis of painting and the determination of self, Cabaniuk asks their viewer to ponder a new Eden; one that embraces camp and community, sparks both a spontaneity and space of and for sexuality, as they explore the authority of Queerness (and the ever-shifting boundaries that limit its power) in their dazzling work.

Lauren Brown, Place, 2025, Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm (19 3/4 x 23 5/8 in)

From the burning dynamo of desire – hidden, revealed and then celebrated – Eden turns inward and takes us to the very edge of its transformation into Hell. Hell being the space that lives deep inside of us (or at least other people, to paraphrase Sartre once more). Lauren Brown’s Place (2025) opens the gate to another amphitheatre of Biblical terror, made up of searing brushwork that oozes across her canvas, squelchy and quaggy, bruising, putrefying and germinating all at once. Here a vortex of Brown’s typically urgent notes in pink, purple and orange fizzes in and out of the painting’s central axis but is now further antagonised by primordial forms – trails of ghostly greens and hieroglyphs of jaundiced yellows - that gather in around it, offering more painterly tension than ever before. From Cabaniuk’s secret spaces where voiceless love finds its name, Eden now mutates once more and becomes the viscera and gore of the body itself. Space is pyrotechnically registered here, stretched into distance and ‘scape by Brown’s elongated, assured marks, yet the density of her swift, oily strokes only serves to collapse rather than expand our vista. Rather than observe Eden as a garden or place, we now understand it as the moment the apple touched Eve’s lips; the trace of that sin and then guilt searing through her and Adam’s bodies. An expulsion read as an evisceration, forcing the viewer to, once again, occupy the interior and exterior of both Brown’s image and the narrative she engages with, transforming geology into anatomy, faith into horror, explosion into implosion.

Martyn Cross, Lord of Eternity, 2024, Oil and sand on canvas, 66 x 86.4 cm (26 x 34 in)

What is left after the body has been purged, after the Congress of innocence has crumbled? The emergence of a new Eden. New idols replace old ones only for them to proselytize the same old rulebook of chasm, conquer and control. Martyn Cross’ enigmatic Lord of Eternity (2024) offers a phantasmagorical face, seeping through and across a sunset seascape. One eye the sun; a pyramid for a nose, from which snakes branch out to tend to (perhaps impregnate) tiny eggs floating on a vulvic barge, this Orwellian, Oz-like head offers no explanation other than to confirm its hushed, cryptic presence as well as the promise of a life-giving force. The quixotic mystery of Eden, disturbed by the very human, earthly tale of crime and punishment, has now returned, but with a different protagonist choreographing the narrative. Cross’ Lord is a hybrid of several deities (and perhaps a despot or dictator too), activated from many different (and conflicting) religious or spiritual texts, yet is announced in a knocked-back, harmonious palette of pale ochres, beachy yellows and dark greens, made more organic still by the sand that gives Cross’ surface its very earthly yet frangible texture. This god may very well speak to the uncanny ambiguity of the spiritual world (simultaneously transient yet penetrating), but it remains just another celestial creature created by a human from materials found on Earth. We are once again left to face the enigma – lie, even – of Eden as sign and signifier, now reborn from the dirt we all emerged from and to which we must all return.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
8-12 June, 2025