ECHO SOHO

Liminal Gallery is delighted to participate in the inaugural edition of Echo Soho, a new art fair founded by and for female-led galleries. Liminal Gallery’s participation has been made possible with the generous support of No. 42 by GuestHouse, Margate. This presentation brings together new works by Maud Whatley and Fipsi Seilern, two artists who extend the possibilities of coloured pencil while engaging in an ongoing dialogue with the legacies of art history. Though distinct in approach, both artists employ meticulous mark-making to generate uncanny, layered images that unsettle familiar references and open new modes of interpretation.

Working on paper, Whatley collages fragments from canonical European painting with images drawn from online archives and personal snapshots. In her hands, these motifs are wrested from their original contexts and reconfigured into compositions that hover between the intimate, the erotic, and the absurd. Her work probes the politics of looking, exposing the strangeness that emerges when seemingly disparate sources rub against one another. Slow, tactile, and insistent, her drawings privilege ambiguity over immediacy, producing encounters that are both charged and strange.

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 pigs, her imagery is at once playful and unsettling.

Referencing medieval tapestries, the visionary worlds of Hieronymus Bosch, Japanese woodblock prints, and Middle Eastern miniatures, Seilern constructs landscapes that oscillate between order and eruption. Her hallucinatory compositions operate like visual palimpsests, where the medieval and the contemporary collapse into one another, reflecting both personal and collective anxieties through a distinctly surreal idiom.

Together, Whatley and Seilern offer two complementary approaches to drawing: one borrowing literally and playfully from the canon, the other channelling its spirit through intuitive invention. Both practices reveal the persistence of historical imagery and its reinvention in the present, demonstrating how drawing, through its slowness, tactility, and intimacy, remains uniquely capable of producing meaning that is at once unsettling, seductive, and strange.