Margot Samel is happy to current Life Hum, a solo exhibition of recent works by the Scotland-based Amy Winstanley (b. 1983, Dumfries, UK). That is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Life Hum refers back to the fixed buzzing motion of all matter, from a social to a molecular stage. In every portray, by each second, life is jittering, fluctuating, wavering, vibrating, and oscillating. Winstanley merges an improvisational, intuitive, and observant follow, with a type of essayistic manner of constructing our bodies of labor, portray throughout a number of canvases directly to permit some to grow to be extra figurative–thesis-like–and others to take a seat inside their textures and abstractions. Particular works even seem to echo one another, appearing like modifiers or prepositions by their compositions like in We Need to be Helpful, and Variety, 2025, and Whereas We Wait, and Fruit, 2025. This technique stresses an interconnected-ness that Winstanley is invested in whereas the entire exhibition mimics broader synchronistic choreographies of life. The current is a resonance of all the pieces that was and all the pieces that shall be; it’s a type of fixed, multi-layered, all the time unfolding, messy center floor.
The artist usually works carefully with literary references whereas within the studio. For this physique of labor, she pulls from author Bayo Akomolafe’s, These Wilds Past Our Fences, which consists of a collection of philosophical letters to the author’s daughter on the comings and goings of dwelling at the moment. The motifs, palettes, and topics that emerge in Winstanley’s work are partly impressed by his round views of time, and act like conductive tuning forks which place Winstanley inside life hum. For instance in, They Are Simply within the Different Room, 2025, she recollects an anecdote in reference to the life and dying of members of the family; reasonably than their disappearance from our lives, their passing is actually as if they’re in a room subsequent door. Texts like these remind us that life is everpresent, it comes and goes and comes once more. All issues return to us ultimately, or ask that we re-meet them in new and stunning methods. Portray right here acts as a service for historic information rising within the ‘now,’ serving to mediate exterior and typically seemingly unmanageable modifications.
Life hum turns into a method to envision hyperlinks between ourselves and the larger orders of the pure world that we’re part of. To think about the vastness of time as that of the Earth itself, the works within the exhibition transfer between micro and macro articulations of power, matter, and change. All through Winstanley’s larger follow, as with the current, nothing is ever really separated, remoted, or individuated from one thing else. Your entire interconnected universe, from the whirring of molecules throughout to the ghosts and gods of generations previous and future occur directly, in textured coloration fields, brushes of strains, or glowing gentle sources forged off-frame. Quite than an area of relativity, this turns into an area of non secular residence–as in throwing oneself into a chilly lake–a complete and clarifying expertise of turning into, like language or portray itself. —Emily Small
