Artist: Mary West

Twilight Contemporary presents Mary West with Awash, a solo exhibition of paintings exploring the paradoxical nature of water.

West’s work views water as both requisite and destabilising, as something tender and furious. You will notice as you walk through the exhibition that the paintings trace waters shifting moods and emotional registers, revealing an element that is at once cleansing and polluted, transparent and opaque.

Through vivid, and very gestural abstraction, Awash becomes a space to consider both psychological and ecological conditions. There is a tangible balance between turbulence and calm, clarity and disorientation. West, drawing from memory rather than direct observation, blurs the line allowing the experience of water to emerge very personally and viscerally for each viewer.

The personification of water in West’s work, not literal but deeply felt, encourages us to think of water as a sentient presence, an entity that demands even greater care, understanding, and respect. Influenced by Roni Horn’s Some Thames and Robert Macfarlane’s reflections in Is a River Alive?, West’s paintings situates both water, and painting itself, within an ongoing cycle of transformation and exchange.