The exhibition begins with love, but becomes an exploration of what happens to love when it becomes memory. What does it mean to carry someone with you? How do the people we love continue to exist within us, even when they are absent? And what does it mean to be haunted by someone—not through fear, but through affection, memory and the feeling of their continued presence?

“Love doesn’t just disappear, it floats around”
- Daisy Parris, September 2026

The exhibition features a body of new paintings alongside a large scale installation.

We often think of haunting as something frightening: a presence that returns, something unresolved that refuses to disappear. But to be haunted can also be something much more tender. It can mean that someone has stayed with you. A face, a gesture, a voice, a particular expression or a moment can return unexpectedly, resurfacing in the mind without invitation.

In this sense, we are passive participants in our own memories. We don't necessarily choose what comes back to us, or when. Something simply appears: a person we haven't thought about for years, a familiar feeling, a place, a particular quality of light. Memories have a life of their own. They return, repeat and change, becoming part of what we carry.

The paintings explore this sensation of return. Some images linger in the mind in the same way a memory does; they continue to surface long after we have encountered them. A painting can haunt us too—not because it frightens us, but because something within it stays unresolved. A colour, a mark or a feeling can follow us, returning later and asking us to think about it again.

Weather becomes another kind of haunting presence within the work. It is something experienced collectively yet remembered personally. A particular light, the grey of a rainy afternoon, the warmth of a summer evening can become attached to a person or a moment. Years later, the same atmosphere can return and suddenly we are somewhere else entirely. Like memory, weather passes through us, changes constantly, and yet can leave an unexpectedly lasting impression.

This idea of returning is embedded within the physical process of making the paintings. Layers of paint are built up, obscured and scraped back, revealing marks that have been hidden underneath. Earlier images and gestures remain within the surface, sometimes almost disappearing and sometimes unexpectedly unearthed. The colour palette for this exhibition is another return for Parris, to earlier combinations but this time more complex and weathered over time, a result of an artist and a person who has developed through experience.

The textile installation will continue Parris’ exploration of the medium. This new work will amalgamate multiple frayed canvas scraps usually reserved for their paintings, some haunting the studio for years, finally finding their place stitched and expanded into a much larger installation that will hang in the gallery.

The works in this exhibition carry their own histories. Nothing is completely erased. What we see in the present has been shaped by everything that came before it both through artistic practise and by life. The surface becomes a kind of memory: accumulated, altered and continually revealing traces of what lies beneath.

The process reflects the way we remember the people we love. We revisit them, reinterpret them, forget details and rediscover others. Recollections shift and accumulate, but the people themselves remain part of our internal landscape.

The exhibition asks us to consider haunting not as a condition of fear, but as a form of continued presence. What does it mean to be shaped by what we have loved? What happens to the people and moments we carry with us? And can remembering be understood as another form of keeping someone close?

The exhibition is an invitation to sit with those things that return—to embrace the memories that linger, the marks that cannot be completely scrubbed away, and the people who remain with us in ways we may never fully understand.

Because sometimes, to be haunted simply means you have loved and been loved deeply in return.