BETWEEN WAKING AND WANTING

Between Waking and Wanting occupies a tender, uncertain space between conscious awareness and the unruly territories of desire, fantasy, and emotional drift. It brings together the work of four artists, Maud Whatley, Fipsi Seilern, Emma Richardson and Chloe Bonfield, each of whom explores the subtle strangeness of interior life: its rituals, its erotic charge, its mythologies, and its moments of psychological slippage. The exhibition is concerned with the in-between. The partial thought, the lingering image, the sensation that hovers just beyond articulation. It evokes a state where the body may be still, but the mind is elsewhere, half-sleeping and half-reaching, moving through dream logic, memory, and longing.

Maud Whatley’s drawings unfold like fragments from a dream or a film sequence, drawing inspiration from the opening of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and the uncanny dreamscapes of mid-century cinema. Her works operate like a storyboard, flashes of imagery that connect and disconnect as the mind works things out. Erotic undercurrents run throughout, where moments of heightened aliveness surface alongside vulnerability, reflecting states of physical and emotional uncertainty.

Fipsi Seilern’s intricate drawings on untreated wood conjure the atmosphere of dream fragments. Populated by cowboys poised to strike, horses in boots, and solitary figures communing with skulls or miniature animals, her imagery is at once playful and unsettling. Referencing medieval tapestries, Japanese woodblock prints, and Middle Eastern miniatures, Seilern constructs hallucinatory landscapes that oscillate between order and eruption.

Emma Richardson’s large-scale paintings pursue ecstatic states through saturated colour, gesture, and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow.

Her work engages with psychology, transcendence, and female desire, while also drawing on the theatrical intensity of Baroque painting, where illumination and darkness heighten emotional and sensory charge. Her paintings operate as thresholds, where excess, surrender, and the desire for transcendence carry both promise and risk.

Chloe Bonfield’s painted figures appear suspended mid-thought, caught within intimate interiors or unplaceable landscapes. Drawing on mythology and archetypal narratives, from fairy tales to tarot, her works suggest characters on the brink of transformation. Their presence is ambiguous, not absent but diffused, reflecting forms of quiet dissociation, inner retreat, and the mental states shaped by caregiving and reverie.

Together, these works form a conversation about the textures of mental life, where images flicker without resolution, longing persists, and meaning remains just out of reach. Between Waking and Wanting invites us to dwell in these uncertain moments, not to decode them, but to feel their charge.