Scene XVI: pity this busy monster

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, April 2026

I: FROM CREATURE TO CHAOS

“All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.” (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus [1818], chapter 10).

We are but six years into a hopeless decade that has, already, paralysed experience and nullified hope with a lethal cocktail of viruses, virulence and violence and to such an extent that none of us know if we’re coming or going. Our plight is exacerbated even more by the political buffoonery of so many so-called ‘leaders’ who, rather than provide succour or resolution, merely fan the flames of such bedlam to finance their stranglehold on power. The 2020’s is proving to be yet another cycle in history where the fatuous frivolity of one deluded individual can – and does - trump the collective responsibilities and intelligence of entire nations and societies. It is safe to say that we, truly, live in monstrous times.

There are many who believe the purpose of art is to reflect the vagaries of our reality. As Hamlet said, ‘art is the mirror hold up to nature’ (III, ii, 17-24). However, for some, art provides more than just reflection or consideration, instead – to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht – it offers ‘a hammer with which to shape it’. The task of fashioning streams of structure, syntax or Signification out of the Jabberwockian political nonsense that currently prevails is a gauntlet laid – and picked up – by numerous artists, writers, musicians and auteurs, all of whom till a most fertile artistic soil, enriched by such consternation and which seeds any number of creative enterprises that engage with today’s undeniable sense of lack and loss felt by so many. Film – perhaps the most popular (if not populist) form of artistic expression – has lately offered several performances that directly speak to the horror and absurdity of these times. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning One Battle After Another (2025) paints a picture of the puerility and paranoia that nourishes so many of our political administrations (and especially its principals), whilst Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) muses on Mary Shelley’s monster – a creature that is both antagonist and protagonist, both perpetrator and victim of any number of heinous atrocities.

Frankenstein’s monster – or ‘creature’ as ‘he’ is referred to throughout Shelley’s novel – is the oxymoron that fuels this exhibition. A life stitched together from death that serves to illuminate the many binaries or contradistinctions that pollute our current landscape of understanding, be that rooted in the otherness of self; the corruption of meaning; the mendacity of a new, substitute mythology; the shape of chaos. In this Scene, seven artists map out a journey that begins with a creature, plagued by hybridity, terrorised by its own monstrosity, and ends with a miasma of fire and brimstone where inchoate form, space and acceptation melt into crepuscular illusion. The ‘busy monster’ in question – our (anti)-hero - begins as a figure only to transform into a silent, secret dissipation, then resurrect as a simmering composite of past and present, fact and fiction, sanction and denial and, finally, deliquesce once more into the annihilation of its own making. This creature confronts as much as it camouflages; it speaks directly to us with clarity and alacrity only for it to maunder off into the grumbled abstruseness of abstraction or abbreviation. Both trajectories – assonant and dissonant – serving to underscore the searing dynamo of the creature, empowered as it is both as totem in propria persona and temper in absentia. Even as this journey is fraught with (and frit by) physical and indexical entanglement, flummox, decomposition and (re)invention, it merely echoes the same bewilderment anaesthetizing so much of society today as it attempts to protect itself from those who – monstrously - purport to protect. This Scene is the journey of a ‘busy monster’ moving from sense to nonsense, from hope to fear. The question is not why this journey is of note – we all know why - but, rather, who undertakes it. Who is the creature at hand? Who leads us to the inexorable endgame of muddle, madness and mobocracy?

II: SELF AS SURROGATE

“‘Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil’ cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.” (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray [1890], chapter 13).

Where else than from the shrine of self can the busy monster’s journey begin? Tom Halsall and Sara Birns both determine selfhood as some Hegelian dialectic between the ‘master’ of ‘I’ and the ‘slave’ of me; between an active, cognitive construct and an object that both comprises and betrays trait and experience as a kind of hybrid simultaneity. Their presentation of selfhood not dissimilar from that crafted by the grisly Baron Frankenstein, whose creature was at first intended to be like him, but which eventually became eight feet tall (and insane) not necessarily because of any dereliction of duty or failure of faculty on the Baron’s part, but because of his arrogance. The creature, born of death, lives because of another’s superciliousness.

Tom Halsall, All Things are Begun, 2026, Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm (19 3/4 x 15 3/4 in)

Halsall’s All Things Are Begun (2026) is a self-portrait – titled via Ovid – that presents the artist as a Janus-like figure, with his tilted two-faced head bound by a Möbius strip that both blinds and gags in one endless loop of abrogation. This interrogation is undertaken with no struggle from the artist (as subject and agent), with such compliance further whispered by the spare, barren ground in which the figure resides and, especially, by the glazed, perhaps teary eye that stares out of the pictorial space, seeking deliverance, forgiveness or even further emendation from its unknown source of torment. The result is mesmerising given Halsall’s bewitching painterly powers, with subject, object and author all bathed in the argent light of a soothing pathos, articulated in a classical dialect, that inveighs against the oddity and anxiety of the image.

The artist’s interrogation of himself and of the human figure in general - as cypher and language, as relic or mascot – rewards not as painterly whimsy or even as some kind of Surrealist tactic, but as a type of politicised distortion that elevates the painting beyond the confines of mere ‘figuration’. Even as Halsall’s self-image is burdened with two heads, the manner of its execution remains prosaic and disarmingly beautiful, with this ‘monster’ softly modelled in the still, placid light and fleshy palette reserved for the most tender of portraits. The result is not that the figure transmutes from canny to uncanny but, instead, quite the opposite thrust remains at play. The creature that hides within - that ugly propensity for hatred or violence - is substantiated from the very first observation yet it remains restrained by Halsall’s porcelain brushwork and gentle suffusion of light and shadow. So it is that Halsall’s curious likeness does not hide any inner grotesqueness. Rather, his painting suggests that we are all already the monsters we fear so desperately and which we all, equally hysterically, try to hide by pretending to be human. The discovery of self is, in fact, nothing more than the great ‘cover up’ of the other. Gods are monsters and we are more monstrous yet because we invented them in the first place to absolve us of our own, innate horror.

Sara Birns, Self-Portrait Blue Purple Adam Rainbow, 2026, Watercolour, oil pastel and coloured pencil on 100% cotton paper, 28 x 23.5 cm (11 x 9 1/4 in)

Equally, Sara Birns’ aqueous, dreamy self-portraits register a sense of (her) being but always in dialogue with another, often oppositional thrust, be that a colour, previous time, a Cheshire Cat-like smile or her boyfriend. Self-Portrait Blue Purple Adam Rainbow (2026) offers up a Russian doll of selfhood with the artist’s ‘head’ now a hybrid of her own eyes and nose together with the moustachioed mouth and ears of her boyfriend, Adam. Just as Birns’ glassy, searching eyes stare out of the picture plane in a moment of importunity or confession, so to do rather more nefarious eyes confront the viewer – much more focused eyes that belong to an aerated, irritated emoji or an entomic, fuzzy rainbow, both bubbling inside Sara’s head: an interiorised id in conversation (perhaps battle) with an exteriorised ego which, in itself, is a complex bastardisation of otherness.

Such precarious times infect the reality and purpose of truth so that, today, it oftentimes is much stranger than fiction. That epistemological wobble nurtures Birns’ modus operandi, which is to take the everyday - phenomena or physiognomy; landscapes both exterior and interior - and to inject into them a certain sardonic incredulity - be they bolts of surprise, tingles of tizzy or ejaculates of exultation - without ever diluting or overwhelming their origin. It is a shimmy both opalescent and fragile and which is beautifully enunciated by Birns’ masterful handling of the notoriously unstable medium of watercolour. Much as that material bleeds, blotches and bubbles across her paper into amorphous pregnancy, so too does the strange yet endearing creature Birns has created speak of her, Adam, the bruise of purple or the evanescence of a rainbow and yet it is none of them. Only in their conflict do we, ironically, anchor at a sense of personal, psychological or even symbolic authenticity for both Birns’ hybrid creature and the multi-lamination of indices it – and she – provokes.

III: OTHER AS CORRUPTION

“… Yet if you should forget me for a while/ And afterwards remember, do not grieve:/ For if the darkness and corruption leave/ A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,/ Better by far you should forget and smile/ Than that you should remember and be sad.” (from Christina Rossetti, Remember [1849]).

Nada Elkalaawy, An Original II, 2022 - 2026, Oil on canvas, 76 x 61 cm (29 7/8 x 24 in)

The creature’s corruption, as Sign and Signifier, as subject and object, begins as an alchemical permutation, issuing a transmission of alterity rather than any transformation of self. The focus of Nada Elkalaawy’s An Original (2022-26) is a semi-fictional portrait of a young woman. She occupies the lower central axis of the composition, loosely yet fully modelled, so that her gaze – steady yet elusive; outward yet unfixed; aware yet somehow suspended – beats the drum that drives the pace of the viewer’s own act of looking. We are asked to look longer, further, harder to pass through the many veils of experience – lived and invented – that mark the intellectual tapestry of Elkalaawy’s enterprise and which this young woman would appear to protect like a treasured inheritance and muster like a childhood memory.

This visual thrust continues the artist’s exploration into the dynamics of their heirloom, conveying a multi-laminated space-time that throbs as an endless echo of the past as it confronts the present. Reverberations found and experienced, known and unknown, sparkle across an antique ceramic vessel which the artist has chosen to work through rather than erase so that it seeps through the background in an act of quiet osmosis as haunting as it is delicate, accompanied by small figurines. These ‘children’ – these little creatures - announce the beginning of the painting’s corruption, where a knocked-back abbreviation and subsequent condensation – ocular and oracular – now commands our attention, forcing us to experience a surface that ebbs in and out of dimensional registration.

Elkalaawy’s hazy brushwork confidently makes manifest the pot and its figurines, cementing them very much in the present tense, but, at the same time, its graceful fidget allows her background to feed the shimmer of the corruption at hand. So it is that rather than stress the mutation of one object, tense or plane into another, the artist divulges space-time as an ever-evolving envelopment, piqued into its spatial and temporal cross-pollination by the enzyme of the creature’s desire to corrupt and be corrupted. That need lies in the glistening iridescence of Elkalaawy’s lustrous glazes; it marries ‘is’ with ‘was’, engendering an object-based epigenetic shift that speaks to our collective inheritance of personality and persuasion. The result is a painting that rather than fall foul of such corruption, embraces it. The creature passes only to return, dissolving any gloss intended to protect the viewer from any emotional upheaval created by loss or passing. The creature, now corrupted, fully betrays the real imbroglio of human experience – the decoration of distance as opposed to the intimacy of presence, slowly evaporating into inexorable withdrawal - which ultimately sounds out the anthem of our desires; ours, its, theirs and the echo of such sensitive, subtle synergy.

Graham Silveria Martin, In Touch, 2026, Acrylic on calico, steel frame, 122 x 102 cm (48 x 40 1/8 in)

Like Elkalaawy’s paintings, Graham Silveria Martin’s works offers a hushed disquiet, the luminosity and polish of their execution, coupled with the artist’s precision of intent, at odds with the gentle discombobulation – ripples of our busy monster – that trickles and undulates across the painted surface. Again, subject is ordinarily found, not invented, and in the case of In Touch (2026) that subject is a model taken from the pages of a 1970’s gay pornographic magazine. Seen naked from behind, with but the top of his buttocks on view, Silveria Martin serves up a delectable figure who is painted so determinedly as to feel completely real yet is phrased with such a delicacy of delineation and a sfumato-like attention to modelling that the prose of their figurative authority slowly, softly metamorphoses into something more poetic, cryptic, even mythic.

The creature – now but a whisper of modulation – reveals itself in this very transubstantiation of prose to poetry. It fizzes in the stilled rupture between image and surface, figure and ground, between content and the way such matter is handled. Process, image, index, registration, obfuscation, degradation: all these tributaries (as canon or thought, matrix or mark) wind themselves around each other in delicious entanglement when confronted by one of Silveria Martin’s paintings yet it is the work of that tiny creature of corruption that sends image and surface in altogether different directions. Delicate passages of abstract striations cascade down the canvas, flummoxing this figure, so that any libidinal energy soon begins to fold into a wider conversation about seeing and - crucially - being seen. These gay men - like the artist and this author - present themselves unashamedly, owning their pictorial, erotic space, yet it is these dribbles of abstraction - all which (like Thanatos) have the propensity to shift manner and meaning – that pose a constant threat to the sanctity and hegemony of the figure, their identity and the Queerness it so beautifully projects and protects.

IV: A NEW SYMBOLIC ORDER

“The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering.” (J. Michael Straczynski in conversation with Alexander Jablokov, Boston, MIT, 4 May 1998).

Just as the creature instigates a foggy puzzlement, perplexing all dialects of any image’s Signification, so it transforms itself (and its subject and surface) from languages and practices natural to that supernatural; from known to unknown; from the concreteness of singularity to the ambiguity of hybridity. What occurs after the bokeh-like infiltration of Silveria Martin’s surface or the brushy phantasmagoria of Elkalaawy’s marks is a resurrection of the creature, not as Signifier but as Sign and subject, now made more complex by the creature’s efforts to assume a status above its usual station. After all, monsters inevitably strive to become the gods they seek to destroy just as politicians often become the monsters they seek to annul.

Skye Tholstrup, Harpies, 2026, Collage on paper, Framed: 33.5 x 46 cm (13 1/4 x 18 1/8 in) Unframed: 29.5 x 38.5 cm (11 5/8 x 15 1/8 in)

Skye Tholstrup, Girl with Claw, 2026, Collage on paper, Framed: 33.5 x 46 cm (13 1/4 x 18 1/8 in) Unframed: 29.5 x 41.5 cm (11 5/8 x 16 3/8 in)

Skye Tholstrup, Harpies, 2026, Collage on paper, Framed: 33.5 x 46 cm (13 1/4 x 18 1/8 in) Unframed: 29.5 x 38.5 cm (11 5/8 x 15 1/8 in)

Skye Tholstrup, Girl with Claw, 2026, Collage on paper, Framed: 33.5 x 46 cm (13 1/4 x 18 1/8 in) Unframed: 29.5 x 41.5 cm (11 5/8 x 16 3/8 in)

So it is that a new mythology – a new order - emerges, one populated by a new set of creatures in search of ‘the new’ that revel in their abrupt and energetic polarity. Skye Tholstrup’s multifaceted practice engages with the female form, often presented in curious luxation through an exaggerated, whimsical form of collage. Images of (usually nude) women – often registered in clipped reduction and purloined from various magazines – transmogrify into mythical, magical beasts, with the terms of their transfiguration driven by the libidinal energy of their original state now diluted by the cunning symbiosis Tholstrup forces upon the figure with images of animal parts, be they crab claws, bird wings or shells. Harpies (2026) transforms a seductive female nude into a harpy - the ‘hound of Zeus’: that always hungry winged hybrid creature and always depicted with a woman’s face (which, ironically, is absent in the collage) – by adding cut-out bird’s wings to the figure’s torso. Whilst Harpies makes a direct reference to Greek mythology, Girl with Claw (2026) does not. Rather, the creature that emerges here is one that feeds off sex and horror – nourishing the juxtaposition of the somewhat soft, passive kneeling woman set against the Phallic diagonal offered by the hard, amplified claw – and which, in turn, opens up a Pandora’s Box of problematics that orbit issues of agency, humanity and, above all else, gender. The Feminine here assumes both human and non-human form so that even as Tholstrup’s female figures appear passive, the complexity of their collaged interrogation elevates them into creatures occupying both worldly and ethereal realms; simultaneously physical and metaphysical, far from the yielding figure traditionally associated with depictions of the female nude (by men) in art history. The creature, previously a force of perplexity is now one that offers a peculiar surety – of form and manner. Woman is no longer a vehicle for delicacy or sweetness but, instead, a creature-cum-confrontational force to be reckoned with.

Skye Tholstrup, Because of You, 2026, Wood, rose thorns, blown ostrich egg, 44 x 14 cm (17 3/8 x 5 1/2 in)

This assertion of the Feminine over any possible symbolism that would drive that female form into the graveyards of decoration or ornamentation continues with Tholstrup’s sculpture, Because of You (2026). Studded with real thorns sourced near her Dorset studio, a hand-turned wooden form (akin to a candlestick) supports a hand-blown ostrich egg emblazoned with the object’s title. Thorns are loaded with various meanings and, iconographically, signify punishment and sin. Specifically, the Original Sin associated with Eve. Cutting into the Phallic wooden support, this ‘sin’ turns from a weakness into a strength, much in the same way that the egg – always understood to be brittle – is here posited and positioned as a triumph of female control and command, resting atop the assemblage, asserting boundaries liminal and subliminal around it. Tholstrup’s creatures are both Heaven-sent yet plucked from our very own earth. Whilst materially fragile as parts, or weakened in individual abbreviation, they possess an undeniable power in their tessellation, delivering definition, resilience and protection.

Jordan Rubio, What are you afraid of losing, when nothing in the world belongs to you, 2026, Oil on linen, 180 x 160 cm (70 7/8 x 63 in)

Tholstrup’s creatures survive because of their agitation. They prevail because of the Hegelian dialectic of self and/as other, as discussed earlier, which deformed before but now reforms instead. A similar strategy unfolds in the heady, often fiery paintings of Jordan Rubio. The same protagonist – whom the artist refers to as his ‘creature’ – populates nearly all of Rubio’s paintings. In What are you afraid of losing, when nothing in the world belongs to you (2026) the creature appears twice, as if to cement the dialogue between ‘I’ and ‘me’, but only very subtly so. The underpainting has two distinct figures coiled around one another so that it is not certain where one begins and the other ends, however, Rubio has removed most of the second figure’s trace, leaving behind – Frenhofer-like – just the tiny finger of an other’s hand resting on the figure’s right thigh.

All of Rubio’s creatures propose a contest between agency (stressed and distressed as figure; regressed then progressed as its memory) and, as here, with an ever-flummoxed ground of Guston-like reds and blacks (with Rubio’s marks sharing the same wild, instinctual application as Guston’s own unique brushwork), all billowing with a glossary of possibilities. That flux howls ferociously in the creature’s visceral animality, made more profound by the fact the figure consumes nearly all the pictorial space that frames it. In turn, this magnifies the sense of physical, psychological and compositional combat inside and between the creature, its pictorial space and, indeed, us as viewers.

Rubio’s creature is both blessed and burdened by a Rodinesque hyperbole and intensity, so that the figure already begins to formulate its own new mythic status through figural association. Add to that the bulk of Schwarzenegger, the sneak of Arlecchino and the dread of Frankenstein and, like the Baron himself, Rubio has created a fully formed figure that functions like a mythological creature – inspiring awe and dread in equal measure, shifting shape as it does so, bouncing between subject and object, human and beast, painting and sculpture. The result is a creature that would appear to muse on the hyper-masculine, much as Tholstrup focuses on the Feminine; one that offers up Herculean tasks for both Rubio and it to tackle, orbiting around the optics and mechanics of presence, space and the strength (yet dubiety) of (self)-assertion. Just as the creature heaves with an anime-like muscularity, so too is it distressed by fidgety notes of elastic abstraction that, ironically, stem from the same gene pool. Abstract marks that eviscerate as they evaporate; prop as they confound. So it is that Rubio’s part-jester, part-monster, part-bodybuilder is a creature born to test the flesh and truth of what we see and what we feel; a creature invented and sustained by its creator so that what we see is Rubio’s self-portrait holding up a mirror for his viewer. The creature is our own reflection. We are our own busy monster.

V: THE SHAPE OF CHAOS

“Art is chaos taking shape.” (Pablo Picasso, n.d.)

Lauren Brown, Agitator, 2026, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm (15 3/4 x 11 3/4 in)

The creature’s descent into chaos is both inexorable and necessary. In a world where trust is destroyed, institutions fail, lawlessness abounds and the social fabric dissolves into sheer desperation, all the creature has left is chaos. All the creature can create is chaos. Lauren Brown’s most recent paintings continue her interest in composing topographies of viscera or biologies of ‘scape, both existing in a perpetual state of tension where forms twist, as both shapes and cyphers; lines flicker in and out of planes of bitumen colour – both evanescent and saturated - encouraging a collision then dissipation of shape and chroma and a surface that never starts or ends but rather sits on the edge of some primordial coalescence, shedding its dark light on our tested experience. Brown’s palette has become darker – more pummelled; more bruised – and, as such, her surface has become richer and even more chimerical. One cannot find the creature per se in Brown’s Agitator (2026). It breathes momentarily in the vicious streak of sinewy paint that slithers at the bottom of the artist’s canvas. It attempts formation in the nebula of lavenders and lilacs that haunts the centre of the composition as a profile yet fails deliciously. The agitation that Brown’s title refers to is that experienced by the creature, as it zooms around the apocalyptic space searching for declaration and finding none.

Lauren Brown, Weird Fog, 2026, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm (11 3/4 x 15 3/4 in)

Across Agitator and another smaller canvas, Weird Fog (2026), Brown orchestrates a ballet of glazes that serve to emulsify form and, by extension, inject yet more unease into the architecture of her painting. The resulting fog that drifts across both paintings is born from Brown’s interest in the art of J.M.W. Turner – an artist who was passionate about the chaos of life and whose own eerie mists sought out and immortalised both the horror and the beauty of decay and disorder. Again, more tendons of terror stretch out across Brown’s ground, pulling her palette into blocks of contused terrain which, just for a second, leaves behind more snippets of a humanoid form – Bacon-like gasps of a mouth; Guston-like extremities. The hellish space she creates is both micro and macro; both inside the creature and its own infinitessimal chaos. We are left with a surface made up of marks that deliberately ebb in and out of characterisation (without ever losing their agency); that denies the illumination of experience or knowledge in favour of the caliginosity of the unknown; that empowers a painted surface which, like some sinewy tesseract of becoming, throws pillars of being into jeopardy and has the creature find its final flourish in its ultimate jettison as Sign and its most powerful arrangement as Signifier.

VI: PITY THIS BUSY MONSTER

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:your victim (death and life safely beyond)plays with the bigness of his littleness

ee cummings, pity this busy monster, manunkind (1944).

Published as the second World War continued to upend and recalibrate life, Cummings’ poem serves as an excoriation of humankind or – as he prefers to call it – ‘manunkind’. Those capable of such abominable acts of genocide, in turn, forced others to behave in a similarly odious fashion. Death begat death until there was no-one and no system left; mankind became – and stayed – unkind. As it was, so it is. The creature – our busy monster whom we must pity much as we must pity the monster Frankenstein or the harpy Aello, both being tormentors who merely reflect their own torment – is us. We are the creature that starts as self, then initiates change to reconfigure itself into a being bigger, bolder and with more bullets only for that being to finally succumb to the inexorable sands of time and liquesce back into anonymity and the chaos from whence it came.

Our little, tiny speck of blue in the universe’s endless, obsidian ocean is, very sadly, plagued by a handful of busy monsters, some of whom deserve our pity, some of whom do not. Each of the artists in this Scene has created forces of interruption that are as political as they are aesthetic and which sometimes powerfully, other times poetically, often times beautifully and always so intelligently convey this creature’s progress (its ‘comfortable disease’) as that undertaken by any number of errant politicians or leaders, thirsty for power (‘the bigness’) yet starved of the capacity and moral compass (‘his littleness’) necessary to manage it and, by extension, us.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
19-21 April 2026