Gordon Robichaux is pleased to announce Going Without Saying, Siobhan Liddell’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The artist will present a series of new paintings that embody her ongoing interest in the passage of time, the fleetingness of existence, and the tensions between natural and manmade structures.

Since the mid-1980s, Liddell has explored the phenomenological potential of materials—how a scrap of paper catching light can reflect the span of a day, or how a piece of metal hung from a thread can conjure the weight of a body. Liddell’s assemblage-like paintings emerge from the realms of memory and imagination. Some evoke the unfamiliar beauty of newly discovered landscapes, where natural formations like rocks, caves, and islands reveal layers of history that have endured with quiet solidity. Others turn to the ongoing comfort experienced in familiar settings, such as the city bridge glimpsed on her weekly commute. Uncovering the structural dialogues between organic and built environments, Liddell contemplates their poetics of form. Interwoven with these sceneries are portraits of the artist’s son in moments of vulnerable adolescence, the gentle rhythm of her dog’s breath behind a veil, and the ethereal wisp of incense smoke. Through this interplay of exterior and interior surfaces, Liddell hints at the paradox of how the ostensibly delicate can hold an unexpected resilience, while the seemingly sturdy may conceal a startling fragility.

Exploring states of attachment and suspense, Liddell adorns her paintings with intricate three-dimensional objects such as glazed ceramic hands, leaves, and eyes. A nod to her early sculptural practice, these adornments—often rendered in ceramic, but also in bronze, paper, wire, and textile—pull the paintings out of the two-dimensional surface of the wall and into the space of the viewer, thereby activating a physical awareness of the viewer’s body and its surroundings. One sculpture, a bronze cast of a wooden branch, materializes Liddell’s exploration of impermanence and continuity by transforming a fleeting fragment of nature into a tentatively permanent woman-made sculpture.

Throughout this new body of work, Liddell continues to investigate the nature of presence and perception, seeking to articulate the ineffable. Rather than strive for mimesis, the artist focuses on the act of seeing itself, capturing moments of her own awareness in a transient world.

—Ksenia M. Soboleva