ON WAKING

Jenny Eden, Christopher Hanlon, Harminder Judge, Gillian Lawler, Damien Meade, Karen Roulstone and Rebecca Sitar

20th June – 10th August 2025

On Waking is a group painting exhibition featuring new and existing work by seven painters from Ireland and the UK, whose paintings communicate wonder and encounter, things half-glimpsed, remembered and imagined. It brings together paintings with an otherworldly sensibility, where the slippage between recollection and metamorphosis, between what is real or imagined, is played out in a series of new realities.

The title of the exhibition directs us to the ‘waking moment’ when our sense of time and reality is unlike usual conscious experiences. As we leave the cocoon of sleep, the veil between waking and sleeping falls away, and the transition from sleep’s slumber ignites continuous time and an openness of the self – nothing is finite. In this ‘preconscious’ state we are open to the possibilities of ‘becoming’. Time feels expansive, fluid not fixed, and divisions between past, present and future dissipate in favour of a temporal fusion. The paintings in On Waking mirror this moment in a myriad of poetic, philosophical and perceptual ways.

Opening up to ‘being in the world’, these paintings also prompt a poetic sensibility and a different viewing, an attentive and participatory gaze. Encouraging an active way of seeing, the paintings do not describe an event; they are an event, resembling poems and Lavinia Greenlaw’s notion of poetic form: “a poem is a vessel, it’s a place in which you hope the reader will have something activated in them rather than enacted for them” [1]. And like poems, paintings hold experience and perception acknowledged by the viewer in the act of looking, who changes what is being observed and, through observing, becomes part of the picture.

The paintings in this exhibition invite a slow gaze, a complex ritual in ways of seeing. They pivot between representation and abstraction, looking one way and the other, oscillating productively between the two. Occupying this liminal space, paintings become “potential images”, according to Dario Gamboni, “established – in the realm of the virtual – by the artist, but dependent on the beholder for their realization […] their property is to make the beholder aware […] of the active, subjective nature of seeing” [2].

References

[1] BBC Radio 4 (2020) Only Artists: Lavinia Greenlaw meets Charles Avery, 11th March 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000g43y].

[2] Gamboni, D. (2011) ‘Everyday Painting’, in B. Schwabsky, Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting. London: Phaidon Press Ltd, p. 14.