As the earth trembled

11 Jul-29 Aug 2025

PV 10 Jul 2025, 6-8pm

Overview

As the earth trembles stages a conversation on artistic creation, drawing together abstract painters whose work is intently focused on process and surface; all of whom bring diverse media into their practices, materially and conceptually. The title is drawn from American feminist writer Adrienne Rich’s 1974 poem The Fact of a Doorframe, in which she narrates the cathartic, mighty process of poetic ideation. As the earth trembles likens the disruptive yet generative force of self-expression in language to that of painting, and the gestural and chromatic possibilities of paint as a medium. Rich’s Doorframe, mundane yet open-ended with its liminal purpose, is reinterpreted here as the pictorial frame, a demarcation of surface and space where paint can assert its meaning or mood. Her linguistic fragments and splinters are materially cast as brushstrokes and gestures in pigment. 

In As the earth trembles, the artists may explore colour as it is rooted in heritage and nature, composition and space as it is drawn from meditation and our inner world, or mark-making as a conduit for emotion. The artists grapple with the psychology of making and the experience of human existence, especially at a time when hierarchies of power are obstructive to progress - whether that be with regards to LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, or racial justice. In times that are fragile or fraught, as the earth trembles around us, painting develops and endures.