TILL AND TOIL

Till and toil
hands labour in soil,
Sow seeds in compacted ground.
This frigid winter, wicks and wilts.
Dig a little deeper.
What can grow from the dark?
Plot a course.
Misadventures down the garden path.

Till and Toil invites viewers into to a vegetal patch where seeds have been sown in a state of agitation, caught between old and new, hope and despair. In a condition of ambiguity, with messages not yet fully deciphered, garden time requires slow listening and an acknowledgement of the season one inhabits.

This exhibition presents a range of forms: tangled botanical arrangements, precarious stacks, indoor and outdoor plants growing under strained conditions, and the figure. Together, they form not a fixed statement but a record of things in the process of becoming.

The central painting, Stagecraft (Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening), 2026, together with companion works Undercover and Tip-toe Garden Time, directly references Lucian Freud’s Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self-Portrait) (1967–68). Freud’s painting delicately observes a singular houseplant, rendered with the same dignity and attentiveness he brought to his nude portraiture. Rather than treating the plant as a symbolic device, Freud attends to its presence as an object in itself. A partial rendering of his nude body cups an ear towards the plant, listening to its quiet everydayness.

In Stagecraft, a similarly partial nude self-portrait is obscured behind a tangled botanical mass. Vegetation bursts forth within a self-consciously staged interior, complete with a pinned bedsheet backdrop and looming disaster on the distant horizon. The figure reflects and listens with a calm resignation, acknowledging conditions that cannot be entirely controlled. The act of listening becomes less an exercise in observation than one of endurance.

Elsewhere, the exhibition draws upon eighteenth-century vegetable-market still lifes. Here, however, singular vegetables are isolated and misshapen, as though affected by unseen forces. In Under Pressure, 2026, a gnarly neon-glowing rhubarb is marled together with a metal fence bent beneath invisible strain. The rhubarb was sourced from the Queen’s Garden at Kew Gardens, London, a medicinal and culinary garden established in the eighteenth century and associated with treatments used during the convalescence of King George III, associated with mental illness.

The cauliflower depicted in Heaven on Earth (1 & 2) reimagines the vegetable found in Joachim Beuckelaer’s Groentemarkt (1567), as seen in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. Animated into a surreal cloudscape, its internal structure appears ethereal, inviting ascension towards the heavens, while the graphic flatness of the severed stems pulls the viewer back to earth. The work hovers between transcendence and materiality, aspiration and limitation.

From the garden, Till and Toil ventures indoors.

Like Freud’s attentive listening to his houseplants, I found myself turning towards my own in a period of disquiet and uncertainty. Houseplants became quiet companions within the studio:
witnesses to repetition, waiting and gradual change. Pothos Still Life (1 & 2) depicts a common low-light houseplant painted in a restricted palette and compressed pictorial space, where flattened shadows pattern alongside flattened leaves. Custom-made vases emerge among the tangled vines, appearing subtly anthropomorphic and echoing Munch’s The Scream. Their handles press against tapered necks as though stretching upwards in exclamation: a silent scream from a silent witness.

Delving further inward, Till and Toil also digs up buried remnants from earlier periods of practice. Motifs that have lain dormant return to the surface, particularly the everyday pile and the relational figure. The five-panel sequence Off-Kilter situates precarious stacks of moving boxes alongside pairs of male and female nudes. Across the panels, the figures navigate fraught attempts at connection, passing through states of tiptoeing, provocation, confusion, decision making (crossroads) and stasis. Revisiting these motifs felt less like looking backwards than discovering what might still grow from previously sown ground.

Till and Toil is a snapshot of a studio practice shaped by a thorny six months. In a Shakespearean sense, the title sits only a breath away from “toil and trouble”, yet this exhibition is less concerned with catastrophe than with persistence. Gardens offer no guarantees; they demand patience, attention and faith in processes that often remain hidden beneath the surface.

Getting one’s hands into soil is said to provide measurable anti-stress and mood-boosting benefits, earning it the nickname “nature’s antidepressant”. Perhaps this metaphorical garden can offer something similar: a place to pause, listen closely, and consider what might still grow in difficult seasons.