We’re delighted to open our very first exhibition with Michael Ash Smith, featuring an evocative series of works inspired by Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector.

“It wasn’t a difficult sadness. It was more like a sadness of longing. She was alone. With eternity in front of and behind her. The human is alone.”

In the written works which inspire this exhibition, longing is not a problem, it’s a reason to be alive. Lispector doesn’t always give her characters clear answers or resolutions. Instead, they linger inside questions, often uncomfortably. They lie in wait. They sit in the space between what is felt and what is said.

Smith visually brings these tensions together, exploring the spaces the author returns to again and again: between self and other, word and silence, presence and absence.