Artists: Marilyn Hallam - Ellie MacGarry

Blackbird Rook and General Assembly present What Remains of the Day, In Dialogue, an exhibition that brings the work of Marilyn Hallam (b.1947) into dialogue with Ellie MacGarry (b.1991). Across generations, both artists explore the architecture of interior life - through doorways, mirrors, windows, fabric, and the quiet gestures of domestic space.

The exhibition focuses on thresholds - not only as physical features, but as emotional and pictorial devices. Hallam’s rooms unfold through layers: a vase on a table, a figure glimpsed beyond a door, a window filtering light across the floor. Her paintings are saturated with detail, yet never crowded. Instead, they suggest the pace of looking over time - slow, observant, attuned to feeling.

MacGarry, by contrast, pares the room back. In her paintings, a body might be cropped, a figure partially glimpsed, a shirt suspended in air. There’s a restraint to her compositions - a careful thinking-through of space and absence that lends them a kind of emotional pressure. What is seen feels deliberate. What is missing matters too.

What unites them is a shared attentiveness to light, to colour and to the edges of perception. Both paint interiors not as settings, but as subjects - sites of intimacy and experience. This is work that asks us to slow down and notice - to consider how rooms hold memories, how fabric catches light, how reflection shapes our sense of self.