In the Viewing Room: In the Space Before Speech
Forthcoming exhibition
Overview
Featuring works by Amy Steel, Kim Booker and Claire Morgan.
This exhibition brings together three artists whose practices use drawing and painting to explore vulnerability as both a personal and shared human experience. Through intimate mark-making, layered surfaces, and expressive gestures, their works reflect moments of fragility, uncertainty, and emotional exposure. Each artist approaches vulnerability from a distinct perspective—whether through the body, memory, or psychological space—yet all invite viewers to pause and consider the quiet complexities of being human. Together, their works form a dialogue that suggests vulnerability is not simply a state of weakness, but a space for connection, reflection, and resilience.
Amy Steel (b.1981, UK) practice asks what a feminist subjectivity could be and how it could affect established structures of power and patriarchal influence on female behaviour. She uniquely combines painting and performance to question systems of representation and the physicality of perception. Her paintings are mostly populated by women engaged in a private, sexual world where visceral pleasures are enacted.
Kim Booker (born 1983, UK) uses colour, gesture and figure to express the psychology of the female experience. Her semi-autobiographical paintings often feature figures in poses that are suggestive of differing emotional states, created intuitively through a combination of gestural abstraction and layers of drawn imagery. Elements are scrubbed out, obscured, and over painted, with dynamic strokes and scrawls of colour reflecting both the physicality of painting and the emotions of the painter, self-censorship in real-time.
Claire Morgan (b.1980, Belfast) engages with the elemental conditions of humans within their habitat and reveals the impossibility of grasping the complexity of life and death: “Exploring the physicality of animals, death, and illusions of permanence in the work is my way of trying to come to terms with these things myself.” Elegance and beauty, but also senselessness and horror, are present in her installations and drawings.
