I have been paying closer attention to my unconscious recently. How waking moments, a certain place or light or emotion, filter into dreams and are transformed into something both uncanny and familiar. This unconscious space, this other, can feel just out of reach, like if you look at it head on it will disappear.It is both unknown and therefore unsettling, as well as somehow innately known
by somewhere deep in the body. These paintings feel like a subconscious act of reaching out into that dark, wading through dirt, through water, through air, and trying to grasp something from that liminal space. It is a process of sifting through particles of the conscious and unconscious, of memory and time and experience, and seeing what settles on top. This space feels like it has its own internal logic and the attempt to give form to this indefinable part of the mind becomes both a burying and an uncovering: a search for meaning. It is also an escape. This process can feel hard to verbalise because it accesses a part of the brain that operates differently. Trying to talk about it can feel paralysing, like trying to describe a colour I've never seen before, or translate a language I don't speak. But this lack of clarity, this unknowableness, is what intrigues me and is what keeps me digging around in the dark.
Rhiannon Inman-Simpson, 2025
In her second solo exhibition at PULPO GALLERY, British painter Rhiannon Inman-Simpson continues to chart the territory where memory, sensation, and abstraction converge. The Echoes is a quiet, resonant show — full of surfaces that breathe, shift, and suggest more than they explain.
Inman-Simpson works across oil painting, paper, and ceramics with a light but deliberate touch. Her largest canvases — The Echoes, Side by Side, Two-fold — suggest distant landscapes or internal weather systems. They hover in a space between material and mood, surface and suggestion. Color is central to her language: not bold and declarative, but intuitive, layered, and personal — a kind of emotional shorthand.
The works on paper — small oils with titles like Flame, Pace, and Portal — tighten the focus, like sketches of fleeting feelings. They add a tender intimacy to the show, as do three modest but affecting ceramic forms. The sculptures, glazed stoneware, feel like objects meant to be held rather than displayed — small anchors in a sea of painterly ambiguity.
There’s a slowness to the work that’s both deliberate and welcome. The surfaces build gradually, and so does the sense of presence. Inman-Simpson paints from experience, but not in a diaristic way. These are not stories. They’re impressions — signals from the unconscious, echoes from the body. The works don’t insist. They suggest. They ask you to sit with them, and in doing so, you start to notice how much is quietly happening.
If her earlier work was about the perception of place, this exhibition moves inward — toward sensation, memory, and the murkier depths of the psyche. Inman-Simpson doesn’t try to define that space. Instead, she gives us glimpses, vibrations, textures. The Echoes is less a statement than a series of gentle calls — and if you’re listening, they resonate.
