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
THE ECHOES
Looking into a garden, I watch a man move back and forth to a compost pile. He is indistinct, older, and hiding his face so that I can’t focus on him. The garden is lush and well-kept, high hedges at the edges. In a flash I see a woman’s face, blue-white and dirty, eyes open on the ground, shoulder length grey hair. There are others in the garden, digging, shovelling, quietly moving the soil around. Again and again they ask the man where the woman is, but he is silent. As I watch him go back to the compost, shovel more dirt in and walk away I realise that I know what’s coming. I know what’s coming. A figure approaches the compost but it is not human, although it has a human form. It is a shadow, a foretelling. Now I am above the compost fast falling into black water, deep deep spinning and I try so hard to close my eyes. I feel like I’ve seen this scene on repeat and I don’t want to see it again but I am being forced to watch. The shadow reaches in past the layers of soil and past the black water and pulls something out of the depths. When the shadow walks away I see that it’s holding a hand, deformed and blackened by the dirt. I know that the hand will be placed somewhere obvious in the daylight where the others will find it, and I know that the woman’s body will be found and the man, the silent one, will be caught. I feel a deep dread.
Rhiannon Inman-Simpson, 2025
