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 observe, with a form of essayistic means of constructing our bodies of labor, portray throughout a number of canvases without delay to permit some to turn out to be extra figurative–thesis-like–and others to sit down 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 Sort, 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 the whole lot that was and the whole lot that might be; it’s a form 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 residing in the present day. 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 remembers an anecdote in reference to the life and loss of life of members of the family; fairly than their disappearance from our lives, their passing is de facto 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 historical data rising within the ‘now,’ serving to mediate exterior and generally seemingly unmanageable modifications.
Life hum turns into a option to envision hyperlinks between ourselves and the higher 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 vitality, matter, and trade. All through Winstanley’s higher observe, as with the current, nothing is ever actually separated, remoted, or individuated from one thing else. All the interconnected universe, from the whirring of molecules throughout to the ghosts and gods of generations previous and future occur without delay, in textured coloration fields, brushes of traces, or glowing mild sources solid off-frame. Relatively 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
