MULTISTOREY

Multistorey is solo exhibition by British artist Rebecca Elves presented as part of Liminal Gallery’s Maternity Series. Using painting as a direct extension of her work in ceramics, Multistorey explores the moment stories overspill their containers. The exhibition presents three large narrative oil paintings on suspended canvas panels, alongside more intimate paintings on panel and the lidded ceramic vessels that spawned them. In this way, Multistorey transforms the gallery into the impossible space within the vessel: a space where narrative cannot be contained.

These paintings emerged from the artist’s frustration at being unable to capture the immediacy of working in clay or wall painting on a transportable surface. She began painting directly from a series of small, lidded ceramic vessels onto long panels of unstretched canvas and found that the stories she had always sensed simmering inside the clay began to spill out through the paint. This process transformed a sense of compressed urgency into strange unfolding worlds.

Rebecca Elves’ paintings and ceramics contain a shared gestural language: intuitive forms gather, heavy with touch, arranging themselves around gaps and crevices before pooling in dense pockets of brushstrokes. There is a sense of dark wit as these forms coalesce into beings – the glimpse of an eye, the fold of a cheek – before dissolving again. The faded colour palette of these paintings saturates them with a sense of longing, of a once-exuberant tea party that is perennially winding down.

As these forms trip across mediums and through Liminal’s intimate gallery space, Elves’ squirming stories break containment.