In the Daylight

A review of Seem both distant and so close

Warbling Collective, 6 – 10 March 2025

Just around the corner from Whitechapel Gallery, along a couple of streets, and down a long, dark, nervous alleyway; there, easily missed by unknowing eyes, is a small white cube with a brick-red floor. The gentle curatorial project Warbling Collective have nested here for their latest show, and it feels only fitting to have propped it up for just a handful of days somewhere away from the noise.

Either side of a doorway into the daylight, Lady and Fa Mao are the welcome chimes waiting to greet you – immediately, you are in between a moment of affection: the touch of a small ceramic crouching lady exhibited high on the left and her little cat sitting on the right. The shine of these cool glazed objects like windowsill ornaments in your grandmother’s living room evoke the sound of her analogue clock ticking in the background. Peeking down from their shelves they are the ceramic relics in an old antique shop, with a dusty quietness and the smell of carpet, and your mind wanders to where they came from and you’ll never know. Her tender fingertips and the cat’s soft chin separated by an entrance but always touching, always in love.

This small, single-room gallery is a doorway into that place, an expression of that quiet moment of intimacy; they are the bookends on the shelf with the stories of everything else in the middle; the head and the tail and inside, the body.

Further in, two tempting paintings are Ellie MacGarry’s Saturday and Yujin Jung’s I think we are being a cake. Both show us groups of people anonymous enough to be one person multiplied (and maybe that’s the point). They are all holding hands, demonstrating that though they are unknown to us, they know each other well – their respective canvas communities linking and clinking like chains never-ending. One of Saturday’s hands is fading away, and I find myself hoping she doesn’t go, for she fits into that space so well.

There is a conflict here between closeness and distance: a longing search for meaning and a more familiar pattern of routine, the ever-growing distance between an idea and its action that is somehow always out of reach. I think we are being a cake is a group of dancers in birthday-cake dresses, spinning in the mystique of it all. Her lurid colours of deep teal and wine-red bleed through like splatters in a blurred vision; I wonder if this is some unsure memory, or an image of a future where one of us can bleed freely into the next like these inky stains, where our intimacies can be shared, grouped.

In the heart of this room, a large swathe of skin fabric drapes over a ceiling frame like it’s been hung out to dry. Closer, it is a parachute – anchored down by a lead vest slumped lifelessly on the floor. What visitor sailed in here, and where did they go?

Anchored Descent tells us of some lone drifter strayed off course who has found their way here, in through the skylight, and rested on a pipe like a pausing butterfly. Echoing just behind, a sandy-hued pastel imprint by Ya Luo pieces together eight smooth sheets of paper to represent a large cell-like drawing that might otherwise be a bodily print left in the sand or some curious natural rock formation carved and smoothed by the sea. Nearby, a small puddle of water is forming underneath Georgia Salmond’s silicone chain of balloony foxgloves. These morning-coloured swelling cups drip down into the concrete with some form of generosity and slumber.

This show, like Nepenthes, is a series of impressions; blurred realities carrying intricate histories and traditions on their backs. The people here are overflowing, relieving their emotions without the possibility of passing through their coherent stages. It’s in this honest and gentle practice that we find nourishment in the unknown, driven to sustain ourselves in our solitude; impregnate with a clear, and often fracturing, hope that is as immediate as friendship and as intangible as an imprint in the sand.