Kim Booker: Flowers Still Bloom: Preview: Saturday 19 September, 2 - 5pm
Current exhibition
Overview
Flowers Still Bloom presents a new body of paintings by Kim Booker which reflect on the increasingly threatened living world and humanity's role in its plight. Inspired by the vital power of landscapes alive with birdsong, shifting light and abundant growth, these works celebrate nature not as backdrop or resource, but as a vast, dynamic force of which we are only one small part.
Human figures, long present in Booker's practice, remain, yet are progressively absorbed into dense vegetation and sweeping passages of colour. Rather than occupying the centre of the composition, they relinquish control, and exist immersed within a larger ecology. In this merging of body and environment, Booker's paintings share an affinity with Pat Passlof's intuitive, lyrical painterliness and Martha Edelheit's sensuous depictions of figures intertwined with nature, where intimacy with the landscape becomes an avenue to reimagining our relationship to the world around us.
Bold in scale, rich in colour, and alive with gestural energy, these paintings evoke not just the exuberance and complexity of the natural world, but also its fragility. The title, Flowers Still Bloom, speaks to nature's quiet resilience and enduring capacity for regeneration, despite the damage wreaked by humankind’s hand. As the boundaries between figure and landscape fade, we are reminded of the lack of distinction between the vulnerability of the natural world and our own. In Booker's paintings, however, we see that even in moments of deep uncertainty and precarity, beauty, hope and renewal remain possible.
Click below to download an essay by writer and historian Catherine McCormack
