Silk: Fleur Dempsey, Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton, Eliza Owen
Silk: a natural fibre known for being at once strong, soft, lightweight, and durable. With its luxurious texture and sheen, silk is also unusually absorbent; it is, has been, and will continue to be a highly prized material.
Silk: an exhibition of paintings, sculpture, photographs of sculpture, and mono-prints byFleur Dempsey, Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton, and Eliza Owen.
Fleur Dempsey’s intimate paintings of colour are invitations to a place both secretive and special. Their schematised rectilinearity provides a focussed framework, arresting and questioning, which unfolds, telling us of a time and place understood purely through colour, devoid of distraction and distaste. Reading as diary entries, hastily taken and then rehashed notes, or melodies of a gentle breeze, a blazing sunset, a hedgerow, a rolling hill, these paintings are indicative of a synaesthetic look at life. Distillations of lived experience into what is among its most foundational of elements, namely colour, Dempsey’s two 2025 paintings, Silken and May, are paintings of what paintings, and the worlds around them, are made. They are also what grounds the sculpture of Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton.
Often shimmering and electrifying, Halliwell-Sutton’s sculpture transforms what is otherwise the void into curvaceous, sensuous space; smooth meets rough, warm meets cold, hard meets soft, and our nothing meets something. Transgressing the limitations of space and time, Halliwell-Sutton manipulates material and in so doing often returns to where she started. Her 2025 photographic work Surfacing is testament to this: photographs of her intensely textured sculptures are developed on entirely flat and comparatively untouched surfaces. Her sculptures cascade through space; undulating and vibrating, the hammered forms for which she is best known appear as though creatures from another time. Agile in her practice, Halliwell-Sutton’s records of experience are unanticipated: her work is light, energetic, and, irrespective of its fragility, imbued with weight and strength. In her 2025 Sightlines (II) aluminium is beaten and sculpted according to an intuitive agenda; a steel plate provides a structure and solidity this work needs both physically and conceptually; and the space it occupies, the air around it, the void: it gently pulsates in response.
Working within a variety of practices, including printmaking, installation, and painting, Eliza Owen’s work explores movement between the natural and the man-made. Her intellective and textural prints map the landscape in which Dempsey’s paintings and Halliwell-Sutton’s sculpture live; deceptively tough, they are extensive in tonal depth and loaded with light. In its numerous guises, Owen’s work recreates the world around her in the abstract; forms are dislocated from their function, but the presence of their previous utility often remains. Her prints, products of a particularly labour-intensive process in which matrices are bent to the extreme, often broken, are telling of this. Her 2025 Memory Theatre, the largest work in the exhibition, is both a detailed dive into this mode of making and a commentary on Giulio Camilo’s c.1519-1544 mnemonic and architectural concept of the same name used to aid memory.
Here, as in the work of Fleur Dempsey and Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton too, there is a conversation between the micro and the macro, the physical and the conceptual, light and dark, softness, strength, whimsy and stability.
Text by Freddie Foulkes
