A Shimmering Tangle brings together new work by Leah Nyssa Stewart, Linda Hemmersbach and Shivani Khoshia, developed during and leading up to a shared micro-residency in Shining Cliff Woods, Derbyshire.

Over several days, the artists spent time together in the woodland, walking, drawing, painting and talking. There was no fixed brief or expected outcome. The residency offered uninterrupted time to think in proximity to one another, to share space without agenda, and to allow conversations—visual, intuitive and spoken—to unfold at their own pace. The exhibition brings together works made during and around this period, alongside earlier paintings and drawings that reveal connections extending further back in time.

Time in the woods illuminated affinities already quietly present within their individual practices: attention, perception, intuition, memory, and the slow, uncertain processes through which images come into being. Painting as a way of thinking. Memory and nature as material. Attention as a form of care. Knowledge forming gradually through repetition, intuition and response.

Although distinct in approach, all three artists treat painting less as representation than as encounter. Images are not predetermined but discovered through making. Colour, surface, gesture and form develop in relation to one another over time, carrying traces of earlier decisions and shifting states. A painting becomes less an object than a record of thinking in process.

What emerged in Shining Cliff Woods was a sense of reciprocity between inner and outer worlds, where perception moves in both directions. What first appeared as stillness revealed constant movement: light slipping across water, leaves trembling almost imperceptibly, insects tracing invisible paths, distant ripples altering everything they touch.

The woodland was never still. Shimmer emerged not as a property of the landscape alone, but within the encounter itself—a restless exchange between what is seen and what is felt.

Beneath the canopy, systems of relation are constantly at work—roots, fungi, water, light, decay and growth bound together in exchanges that remain largely unseen. Change happens slowly, often below the surface, long before it becomes visible.

This sense of interdependence gives the exhibition its title. A tangle is often something to be undone. Here, it is understood differently: as a condition in which complexity is not resolved but sustained. In woodland ecologies, tangles are sites of abundance—where shelter, connection and growth emerge through density rather than clarity. A shimmering tangle is not static, but continuously forming.

The paintings resist fixed conclusions. They remain open, carrying traces of earlier states while continuing to shift in relation to new encounters and conditions.

For Leah Nyssa Stewart, painting begins in close attention to the everyday: light across surfaces, fragments of landscape, garden forms and subtle atmospheric shifts. Her work develops through an intuitive process in which colour, shape and gesture respond to one another over time. Recurring ovoid, cellular and protective forms suggest structures that feel both bodily and elemental. Emerging from experiences of caregiving and motherhood, her paintings hold a tension between interior states and observed world, where images appear to grow rather than be composed.

For Linda Hemmersbach, painting is a space of psychological investigation in which memory, sensation and subconscious thought materialise through process. Working on aluminium, her surfaces are fragile and porous, with dense marks accumulating in clusters and fields. Her practice moves between inner experience and wider registers of geological and cosmic time, holding multiple scales within a single surface. What emerges is less depiction than presence—unspoken, shifting and alive.

For Shivani Khoshia, painting is bound to ritual, ecology and ancestral memory. Organic forms appear not as symbols but as structures through which transformation takes place. Her work explores how emotional and inherited experience can be translated through abstraction, using painting to rework connections between body, landscape and memory. Making becomes a process of repair—returning to what has been fractured and allowing new forms of relation to emerge.

Across the exhibition, nature is not external to these processes but folded into them. Plants, weather, soil, light and geological matter are not subjects to be represented, but conditions through which painting operates. Boundaries between inner and outer worlds soften. Memory behaves like sediment. Colour shifts like weather. Forms appear, dissolve and return in altered states.

During the residency, a recurring observation was that the work seemed to grow from the inside outward, like a plant. Growth is rarely linear. It responds to conditions, time and relation, much of it unfolding out of sight.

Painting works in the same way. It develops through accumulation, hesitation and return, holding earlier versions of itself within its surface. What matters is not resolution, but the willingness to remain with something long enough for it to change.

A Shimmering Tangle emerges from that shared condition. It is shaped by conversation as much as making, and by the belief that understanding is formed gradually—through looking, working and staying with things over time. Like the woodland from which it began, it is held together not by clarity, but by relation.