Scene XVIII: the dark speck in the snow globe

Matt Carey-Williams, London, June 2026

For those who try to hang on
to metaphors,

we’re just the dark speck that gets
into the snow globe,

the small fly resting on the business end
of the log they use to ring the temple bell.

Each of us will shrink and evaporate,
growing thinner and thinner

until we’re less than a mist,
lighter than gravity,

floating,
almost zero on the number line,

adrift but still something,
still stuck here.

William Wingfield Wright, Evaporation(2021), second and final stanza.

CHAPTER I: TO BE AND NOT TO BE

How many times have we been told that the key to a happy, successful life is balance? Yet that desired equilibrium is almost invariably articulated not as the goal, but as the aftermath; not as the champion but as the casualty of a series of contests, be they personal or professional; physical or emotional; lived or imagined. Such exchange begins at the very subatomic, primordial level of being and experience, with protons and neutrons always fighting (ever fought) over endowments of charge, identity and symbiosis since existence began with a very big bang in a dark and obscure space some 13.8 billion years ago. That elemental, particular binary fizz energises epistemology’s efforts to settle discords shaping segregation or union. Through arcs osmotic or diffusive, it sits at the very core of human experience, colouring dialogues between empiricism and synthesis; consciousness and intention. It challenges id to provoke ego; empowers desire to reclassify need. We thus exist in – and as – a perpetual state of confrontation and flux, so to achieve such balance, one must do more than merely stitch together the dialectic threads at play. One must be both positive and negative; both light and shadow; paradigm and process. One must simultaneously beand not beand allow life to act as a barometer for the transition, translation and even transgression of, from and into such polar opposition. Balance sitting in that space between harmony and chaos; assumption and calibration. Neither either, yet curiously both.

The physical act of evaporation offers a neat summary of both the phasing and phrasing between these intrinsic, philosophical states as liquid turns to vapour. It is an act that also issues numerous parallels with the act and arc of painting given that both name sets of visual, physical and conceptual strategies whereby form and edge dissolve and pictorial or substantive presence slips into absence because of the rencounter between liquid, media and environment. When proposed together, the work of Isaac Andrews, Eline Boerma, Bunny Hennessey and Billy Myles-Berkouwer functions as a curatorial connective tissue between a determination for figurative fidelity and an abandonment into abstract dissolution. Each of these newly graduated painters negotiates the journey of the applied or incised mark from legible description to the more ephemeral residue of suggestion, between them demonstrating how the mark so easily shifts between anchor and vector, simultaneously nourishing pictorial, imagistic meaning whilst empowering its transformation into vaporous atmosphere.

That shared journey is one that, both poetically and technically, is propelled by the dark speck in the snow globe that haunts and invigorates this exhibition. The snow globe representing the sanctity of how and who of ‘to be’; its speck, the innovation of what and why of ‘not to be’. It is a not a blot that pollutes or deteriorates, but rather is to be seen as a creative enzyme that doesn’t so much negate the act of mark-making rather than act as an antagonist to recalibrate the agency of painting, thus highlighting the mellifluous drift and conceptual tensions between states of depiction and ambience and their inevitable submission to each other in the practices of this quartet. This is a speck that might infer a compositional or phenomenological lack or loss but which, over time, illuminates its capacity to foster variation; twist the metaphor; offer a different appreciation of the painter’s mark – whether automatic or considered; whether outlined, smeared or glazed; whether contoured to narrate or orchestrated to perform rhythms of colour.

CHAPTER II: ABSORPTION - THE PAINTINGS OF ISAAC ANDREWS

The first stage of evaporation is the absorption of thermal energy. Just as heat changes the form and function of liquid, issuing a spatial, dimensional ambiguity in the process, so do Isaac Andrew’s paintings problematise the status and hegemony of the figure, ground, its shared perspective and palette. In so doing, Andrews nurtures the dark speck as a ninja of surprise and agent of unpredictability in his work.

Isaac Andrews, I Would Like To Call It Beauty, 2026, Oil on linen, 95 x 120 cm (37 3/8 x 47 1/4 in)

I Would Like To Call It Beauty (2026) is a dominated by a seated, anonymous figure that bounces between delineation and demarcation. Set against a simple, yet sophisticated lilac background of seemingly stencilled red leaves, they sit against a diagonally thrust table, decorated with a large, solitary bloom. Physiognomy has been reduced to the haunting trace of a velvety line, just as the figure’s clothes are presented as mere blocks of granite tones, interrupted by tiny rivulets of crimson to effect fabric folds and creases. Hair is likewise flattened as a pure plane of colour but shaped into its own optic and haptic by the artist’s simple line. Everything remains determinedly uncomplicated, with gravity and grace issued singularly and equally through silhouette and its linear interrogation of passages of pure, barely modelled colour. Yet even as the interplay between material, its behaviour and the pictorial organisation that it directs remains resolutely subtle, so does Andrews charge his marks to reveal their texture and fluidity, with this painting offering up almost private moments of dripping, blooming and feathering that add even more preciousness and mystery to its curious atmosphere. Marks may begin as decisive brushstrokes, palette knife ridges or delineated contours, but they soon becomeloci from which Andrews’ elegant evaporation radiates: his thinly-washed surface pulls and pushes colour like stains, defining not just volumetrically but offering a different spatial logic, one that embraces permeable planes and shifting depths so that figures or objects do not occupy space but, rather, flutter in a tonal continuum, their edges negotiating the requirements of figure and field, as one defines whilst the other releases in moments of exquisite, barely visible dissolution.

Isaac Andrews, Echo Chamber, 2026, Oil on linen, 190 x 180 cm (74 3/4 x 70 7/8 in)

Andrews’ Echo Chamber(2026) offers a different chromatic symphony – one of jade-teal tones – that describes a figure about to get out of their equally ideogrammatic bed, with a stripe-wallpapered wall behind her. Once again, line is both commanding yet also often whispered in abbreviation or delicacy. The preservation of that adumbrating-cum-gestural mark as a trace is crucial to any understanding of Andrews’ process. Pressure – as it ebbs and flows – offers a kind of evaporation of memory so that lightly drippy, looser areas of modulation generate not just the residuum of the artist’s intention to create space, but also evince a phenomenology of seeing, asking the viewer to move from mark to mark – moment to moment – recognising both individual strokes and their ultimate synergy as painted fields.

This palpable memory of the painting’s execution feeds into the stature and status of the artist, as figure, subject and object. Both paintings unveil vignettes and protagonists that are completely invented, with their action generic yet strangely idiosyncratic given the familiarity of their pose and environment, so that a very clever game is afoot here and one which explains the echoes inside Andrews’ chamber. His employment of washy tracts of paint, coupled with the deliberate anonymity of his sitter, invests the artist’s figures with an antiquity and contemporaneity born of chromatic loss or denial that operates in compositional contradistinction. The volume of media and colour employed does not battle against emptier, drier, linear bodily abbreviations as much as amplify the fragility of flesh or the benevolence and rarity of longing, beauty and its endless reverberation. The subtlety of the gentle flux Andrews engenders in both (and as) mark, manner, figure, subject and narrative is a masterclass in nuance. One instantly believes one has digested Andrews’ paintings because of the simplicity of their ideogrammatic design and the seemingly uncomplicated relationship they have with their grounds. It is only after you’ve have spent time with his precious paintings that you realise what is, is not; what isn’t, is, was and always will be. It is this tension and tessellation of tense that floods Andrews’ paintings with its pregnancy of possibility, born from the heat of his ground, its impending change, the gentle agitation of his mark making and its inexorable evaporation from place to space.

CHAPTER III: EXUDATION – THE PAINTINGS OF BILLY MYLES-BERKOUWER

Once enough heat has been absorbed by the liquid, the second stage of evaporation unfolds: one where the most energetic molecules rise to the surface, their vibration causing them to break away from the atomic bonds that hold them to the rest of the liquid, preparing for the transition into the gaseous phase. If Andrews’ paintings absorb – line as light, contour as colour – then Billy Myles-Berkouwer’s surfaces betray an exudation of form into nebulosity, pushing function into flux and see shape and meaning seep into its own delicious dereliction, abandoning itself formally, delighting instead like the conundrum or the hieroglyph, making unknown known, and vice versa.

Billy Myles-Berkouwer, Eyebrow Threading, 2026, Industrial paint and artist acrylic on three museum-grade aluminium panels, 100 x 281 cm (39 3/8 x 110 5/8 in)

Eyebrow Threading (2026) is a monumental, starkly horizontal painting in three parts, executed in industrial paint and acrylic on aluminium panels. The left panel shimmers with smeary striations of white, purple and grey pushing constellations of icy white splashes out of the pictorial domain. The ground feels abstract, energetic and distinctly urban, given its metallic palette, support and the graffiti-like marks it registers. The right panel is softer, quieter, revealing the face of a young woman, eyes closed, relaxing as she has her eyebrows threaded. Whilst the face is supple and more flexible than its counterpart panel, it still seems to rest underneath the same jet stream of marks visible in the more abstract left half. Like scars across a hardened, lived skin, these marks test the very beauty that the poster advertising the cosmetic procedure (from which Myles-Berkouwer took this image, found on the streets in Shadwell, London) tries to sell. A distress only amplified by the fact the head is bald; its face missing features and the eyebrow being threaded now turned into a long, agonising arc of paint and solvent that even further diminishes the reality of the figure.

The evaporation of Myles-Berkouwer’s image plays out as a dance between image and index; between the industrial, hard nature of its manner and material and the softer (yet still distorted) appreciation of the human form. The rawness of his heavy metal surface – welded, cut and sanded by hand – at odds with the (air)brushy refinement of his translucent painted image. However, the synergy and simultaneity of both ‘being’ and ‘not being’ here rests in the artist’s dynamic interplay he encourages between languages of abstraction and figuration; vernaculars both geometric and expressive. Hard becomes soft; flat becomes modelled; shape evokes form only to drift back again into the vortex of marks and their making. Gesture is thus arrived at as a scaffold of structure that refuses its finality, appearing weathered as if some epistemic wind has abraded any sense of certainty. Like time; like the boiling water about to gassify, Myles-Berkouwer’s marks become a record of both his intention and his undoing of it. Of what was, is and, ultimately, will be.

Billy Myles-Berkouwer, Vignette I, 2026, Industrial paint and artist acrylic on aluminium panel 25 x 34 cm (9 7/8 x 13 3/8 in)

More painterly, but no less conceptually driven, Myles-Berkouwer’s smaller work, Vignette I, is also executed in industrial paint and acrylic on an aluminium panel. However, the grand theatre of the artist’s nod to a kind of ‘neo-industrialisation’ and the various technologies that emerge from that credo - so evident in Eyebrow Threading- now gives way to a looser, more gestural dialogue between line and ground; mark and meaning. The ideogrammatic outline of a beautiful female head, in repose, is made with quick sprays of an airbrush, resting atop an already embroiled abstract surface that delivers the feeling of the flesh and bone of physiognomy whilst also inveighing against the propensity of paint to capture it in higher fidelity. This vignette is thus not only an exquisite moment of distinction in a flurry of entrancement, but also a moment designed to test why and how such appreciation is so fleeting; why something as ancient as a description of a face can, at the same time, feel so alienated and alienating. So it is that Myles-Berkouwer’s evaporation is a transition that speaks to a culture numbed and crowded by algorithmic imitation and media saturation. His figure carries the dynamo of the painter’s brush, yet it is equally loaded as a signifier of resistance against a cultural drift that champions mass reproduction over individual fabrication. His single, elegant vignette now allowed to resonate with a painterly vim because of – and despite – a reprographic world of commercial means and images that the artist pushes so hard against.

CHAPTER IV: VAPORISATION, THE PAINTINGS OF BUNNY HENNESSEY

The third stage of evaporation is vaporisation. Molecules have now broken free, entering the space above the liquid as gas, with the remaining liquid below dropping in temperature. So it is that in the painterly universe of Bunny Hennessey, form is emancipated from any necessary architecture of shape or meaning, let loose to turn optics into sonics so that marks begin to coalesce into quilts of moments and memories. An experiential thrust still drives Hennessey’s choreography of paint, but it is one no longer stimulated phenomenologically, even if her inchoate, malleable passages still echo the skeletons of their past status or depiction. Rather, experience drifts off into the prism of colour, the muscle of gesture, seeking the triumph of exteriority as it pangs for its loss of interiority. Hennessey’s paintings thus zoom in on the moment form and meaning shifts: that seismic wobble where the very status of painting changes - the very apotheosis of evaporation and abstraction. Where the dark speck lives.

Bunny Hennessey, Over and Out, 2026, Acrylic, oil and pastel on canvas, 200 x 360 cm (78 3/4 x 141 3/4 in)

Over and Out (2026) is a monumental, almost mural-like painting in two parts. Over this vast terrain, Hennessey sets up what would appear to be a pugilistic confrontation between two paragraphs of painting; each panel is filled with the same hazy yellow ground, rusty blocks, wisps of lilac and meandering, searching tributaries of verdant green, yet each paragraph is articulated slightly differently. The left feels more open, gravitating towards the right panel which appears to teeter backwards. The two panels do share moments of specific nexus, amplifying this compositional and directional drift, but, in the main, the painting feels inhabited by two protagonists, cut from the same cloth – but different. The dark speck of transformation seems therefore impossible to isolate in a surface so immense and so ostensibly coupled. However, as we dig into Hennessey’s surface, excavating moments of painterly bravura and tenderness, and the residual narratives that effloresce from such a variegated touch, the blot begins to announce itself. It lies in the gentle tension between the presence of her atmospheric glaze and the memory (or becoming) of an intimate figuration that once was, yet might be, but which feels subsumed by Hennessey’s kaleidoscope of colour. The two paragraphs of paint, fortified by application, groomed by manipulation, openly showcase their own genesis and development from primer to pigment to paragraph; from foundation to figure to field. It is here where the dark speck begins to flicker, activating an abstract ground that speaks figuratively, offering crests and troughs of colour as if the surface breathes, transforming medium into memory into mood.

Hennessey’s message is thus read loud and clear (as the title of Over and Out would suggest) by the viewer. Hers is a contest between line and gesture that unveils the most sophisticated calligraphic economy, inviting ambiguity where one expects identity; process where one expects persuasion, and all of this carried by a palette that does much more than just colour in the gaps – it becomes the gaps. Chroma functioning as both image and index, contouring ‘scape and antagonist, hero and narrative. More than brush or concept or any such subtext of her practice, it is colour that performs in Hennessey’s work. Colour articulates, identifies, narrates and complicates. It is colour that tests the boundaries of Hennessey’s collection and recollection, all of which become diffuse over time as a tonal sequence that attempts to simultaneously unbosom the proton of gaseous representation and the neutron of liquid feeling at work across her surface.

Bunny Hennessey, Early Riser, 2026, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 56 x 56 cm (22 x 22 in)

This is made most manifest in Hennessey’s small, but mightily impactful, Early Riser(2026). The perimeter of the canvas is busy with a myriad of marks, all recorded on a tonal scale of purple, that cluster into lozenges, glyphs, code or Roman numerals. However, that energy is controlled by a quieter passage of green at the composition’s centre, enlivened by a sprightly line that evinces the form of a horse or a goat, perhaps. Floating gently in the centre of all this ideogrammatic bounce and noise, Hennessey’s ‘animal’ gives off whiffs of Marc Chagall’s untethered, sublime creatures. There is a joyous playfulness here - of touch, glaze, line and colour - that is so delicious one cannot help but smile, yet Hennessey’s frisk and frolic always seem to be under control. She never leaves gaps - compositionally or indexically - across her surface; everything feels very woven together through tessellation and delineation, through the confrontation of gesture and colour (and colour’s ultimate liberation). So it is that a choreography - one enabling yet resisting dissonance - unfolds before us: an orchestration that chimes with the artist’s and our own experiences of life, love, longing and loss. A dance in the snow globe that doesn’t resist the dark speck. It embraces it.

CHAPTER V: ESCAPE, THE PAINTINGS OF ELINE BOERMA

The final stage of evaporation is that of escape. Heat has boiled the liquid; liquid has pushed its more agitated molecules to its surface; vaporisation has subsequently begun and all of this is then crowned by the gas departing its aqueous incarceration and drifting off into space. The transformation from one state to another; from visible to invisible; from unity to free-moving independence, is now complete.

Eline Boerma, As long as I am free, 2026, Oil and oil stick on canvas, 160 x 135 cm (63 x 53 1/8 in)

One feels all these stages of evaporation dramatically unfold in Eline Boerma’s heady As long as I am free(2026). The heat; the push; the broil and now the final escape as we witness her painting undergo its own elemental transformation. A squall of itchy, feathery marks darts up and down, dashes from left to right and back again, across Boerma’s canvas, filling her support with the most dynamic energy. Marks do not integrate as much as they bound in and rebound off one another, issuing explosions of colour, cluster and character that revel in their own sovereignty, noted more profoundly in contradistinction than juxtaposition. Underpinning these waves of glaze and brush is a dark scarlet base that seems to percolate in and out of the surface: the painting’s thermos and its source of transformation. The push from one layer to the next is clearly felt in the various degrees of pressure Boerma employs to create depth and density within her albeit saturated pictorial field. One need only look closely to see how one mark forces the trail of another, even as both remain autonomous as gestures and colours. The vapour whispers in the dematerialisation of Boerma’s marks, with several passages notably ebbing away to a hum of diaphanous haze, in contrast to several surrounding strokes whose dogged urgency can speak only to the triumph of their ultimate escape.

Everything feels whipped up, as if a hurricane howls its way through Boerma’s composition, in so doing offering not just the most visceral take on evaporation but also revealing the moment that abstraction finally decides to escape the confines and demands of observation and instead embrace and interrogate the pictorial field and its boundaries as one recalls a feeling; each feathery glyph not narrating but, rather, serving a palimpsest of emotion and suggestion. The evaporated mark operating as a kind of visual memory now smeared into Boerma’s nebular painterly hum, transforming any desire for or design of the object into an electric spatial frequency.

Eline Boerma, Before my eyes, 2026, Oil and oil stick on canvas, 160 x 135 cm (63 x 53 1/8 in)

This quantum quake of the hierarchies of figure and ground is even more apparent in Boerma’s wonderful Before my eyes(2026). The surface here feels more glazed, so that whilst each mark continues to sound its own signature voice, the soft vapour of evaporation somehow suspends each mark into Boerma’s webby composition more resolutely. The result is a surface that swirls like the jet stream yet betrays passages that float in arabesques of delicate hue and shade without punching its viewer with the power of a primary palette. One cannot help but feel that before our eyes, Before my eyestruly reveals the dark speck in the snow globe. It conducts the moment convergence becomes divergence; where form slips into ground; where boundaries push and leak rather than hold. The speck is the very agent of becoming, rather than signifying the fixity of being, propelling not just the practical fluidity or visual energy of Boerma’s brushstrokes, but preserving their indexicality and reconfiguring their semiotic function. Boerma may well disclose the surge and urge of her painterly escape, yet she retains the propensity for each mark to disclose something deeper and darker.She lets them keep their secrets.

CHAPTER VI: ADRIFT, BUT STILL SOMETHING

Painters, physicists and theoretical mathematicians all share the same cause: to create something out of nothing without ever letting nothing go. These four young painters all make marks, scribing moments that, just for a moment, revel in sovereignty only to become mercilessly subsumed by wider compasses of composition, figuration or abstraction. Transformations that unfold like evaporation - from liquid to gas to otherness - unveiling the savagery of an inevitable loss whilst simultaneously disclosing rallies of energies: figure into ground; presence into absence; mark into maelstrom.

Art history is but the journey of the figure as moth, ever drawn towards the light of abstract discombobulation, empowering an evaporation that does more than mark shifts of form, design or image. It voices the painter’s attempt to grasp the ineluctable; to arrest object and subject as they inexorably slide into the miasma of the unknown. Such is the trial of painting - as process, object and narrative - and it is an interrogation undertaken with aching sophistication by these four young painters. Together, Isaac Andrews, Eline Boerma, Bunny Hennessey and Billy Myles-Berkouwer confront the elasticity and seduction of abstraction with the rigour yet skirmish of figuration. The former offering up a torrent of mark and colour that seems to embody transformation’s very own coda, whilst the latter presents the trial that the figure must endure – and abstraction celebrate - as it begins its own distillation and then ultimate crystallisation as cypher and context.

William Wingfield Wright’s dark speck in the snow globe is thus an agent of complication, questioning the dynamic and mechanics of representation or figuration. It is that iota of courage that a painter needs to attenuate the legibility of a mark, even as that process only increases its poetic possibility. It is a force that privileges the drag, scumble and smear of paint; that delights in bleeds and drips; that does not demand the elimination of any marked error but rather its transformation, blurred into statement and halo. Boerma and Hennessey dive deep into an interiority often at odds with an exteriority that interrogates their visceral exploration. Andrews and Myles-Berkouwer embrace the figure only to problematise its status and appreciation (as privileged subject, object and meaning) just as they do so to emblematise the security we all still hope to gain from the art and act of representation. All this conceptual terrain always rustling and simmering formally and materially as all the works here touch on the dynamo and drama of a single mark, an orchestrated surface, an interrogated subject and - in the bigger scheme of things – the perilous world (but a tiny snow globe) we all share that often feels adrift, yet remains home, and is as addled as it is nourished by the dark speck that only art can (and must) provide.

Matt Carey-Williams
London, 18-23 June 2026