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Landing, with a Capital L
Kate Burling
27 Nov - 24 Jan
PV: Wed 26 Nov, 6-9pm
Miłość is excited to present Kate Burling’s solo exhibition ‘Landing, with a Capital L’, a new body of work merging painting with drawing, installation and diary entries. While anticipating Landings, Kate illustrates her interior life; her suspended, repetitive, sensory fascinations pulsate, sag, hover, simmer and liquify.
Her work forms a surreal lexicon of her visceral motifs – throbbing cherries produce tension with colourful abacus beads, butterfly-like confetti that feels like a mouth breathing on your skin, tangled propellers that can no longer move as fast, wrinkled folded wings decorated with ribbons drooping with embarrassment. They are vivid familiarities, deprived of line and detailed explanations, but effervescent, porous and tactile.
I like to write Landing with a capital L because its implied hypotenuse feels like the kind of Landing I’m after. There are only two options if you choose to Land prematurely: one is a springboard and the other is a pool with high walls and no ladders. The Landing I want is diagonal and smooth. I want to plane and descend with the wind under my wings, keeping everything I’ve held so clumsily between feathered layers of bleached muslin and candlelight plates. I want cherries to stand like knights along the runway, offering themselves as sumptuous full-stops, and the patience to pick them up and turn away and forward and forward etc.
Request the exhibition catalogue or press pack.
Kate Burling (b. 1998, Reading) lives and works in South East London. Her iridescent finger-paintings examine a corporeal experience of exponential change. Marking the inside and outside of the skin as initial zones of softness and hardness respectively, Burling observes a gradual obscuring of boundaries as the sponge-like body ages and absorbs. Her paintings are amalgamations of rolling mass with repeated motifs, scattered like confetti. They are places of rumination, where the artist attempts to catch elusive ideas and map them in soft, organic space.
Since completing her BA in Fine Art at Camberwell College in 2022, Burling has presented two solo shows with Nosbaum Reding (Brussels) and Ronchini Gallery (London), as well as taking part in a number of group exhibitions at Christie’s, Guts Gallery, Soup Gallery, General Assembly, Miłość Gallery and Milan Art Fair, and residencies at Goodeye Projects, Pictorum Gallery, Conditions Studio Programme (all London) and Fondazione Sandro Moretti (Umbria).
EXHIBITION TEXT by Kate Burling
Landing, with a Capital L, a phrase which catches itself in a loop, preoccupied with its own shape, is an entry point into a process centred around rumination, repetition and self-analysis. My interior life is all motifs, absorbed and produced, tried out over and over again in every form I can think of. These are cushions for speech, especially when speech falters.
I think one function of these motifs is to store bodily memory. I have gaudy calligraphy for when we would shower together, all soapy and joined up. Or spindly, apish butterflies as arms around my neck, or if I push my hair back and imagine confetti I can feel the graze of a mouth, humming and breathing.
I’ve started saying “I love you”. I don’t know who or what I have in mind when I say it. Sometimes I pretend it’s someone specific, or a mystery figure with a blank face. I think really I’m trying to ground something that wants to float. “I love you” intertwines with the Laurie Anderson lyrics I’ve been comically annunciating: satellites are out tonight, and oh boy, right, again. As I repeat them I imagine all my friends as water particles, floating down a river and beckoning me to liquefy. And I say “fuck you. I’m rigid now. You don’t get it.”
As a group, we’re a compulsive silence-cover-upper machine. My part in it leaks into my alone time. The things I really want voice themselves in negligible whispers. I can pay more attention when they force themselves in images. The work arranges itself accordingly: fruit that pulses with undefined want, drooping bows as shy admissions, abacus beads and pegs on a washing line as attempts at linear narrative, straining to structure what is ultimately elusive. I know I want water poured from my mouth to my feet, and to stand star-shaped inside someone like a Russian doll. I know I want to wear my red silk shirt with all the buttons every time I cycle, so I can feel it flap against my skin and bridge the gap between two types of cardinal. I know I seek out mauve and lilac everywhere. I know I love how everything looks with the sun on it, and how pigeons arrange themselves in irregular grids. When it’s bright in March I want to have a baby, like a sheep. I never want a baby in winter.
I’ve been singing happy birthday to myself at the wrong time of year because I’ve only just realised I can and I’m trying to make up for lost time. I like hearing or smelling or seeing things where I don’t usually find them. I don’t feel the same about taste or touch. They’re too intrusive for surprises. I know I’m getting better over time when I’m not repulsed by outside things seeping in. I’ve become so desperate for the iridescence it would take to Land that I find myself inviting more and more into my hovering body.
I like to write Landing with a capital L because its implied hypotenuse feels like the kind of Landing I’m after. There are only two options if you choose to Land prematurely: one is a springboard and the other is a pool with high walls and no ladders. The Landing I want is diagonal and smooth. I want to plane and descend with the wind under my wings, keeping everything I’ve held so clumsily between feathered layers of bleached muslin and candlelight plates. I want cherries to stand like knights along the runway, offering themselves as sumptuous full-stops, and the patience to pick them up and turn away and forward and forward etc.
Request the exhibition catalogue or press pack.
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