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 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 Seem Both Distant and So Close, and it feels only fitting to have propped it up for an ephemeral 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 betwixt a moment of affection: the touch of a small, ceramic crouching lady 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 of an old antiques shop, dusty with quietness and the smell of carpet. Your mind wanders to where they came from – you’ll never know.

Lady’s tender fingertips and the cat’s soft chin are separated by a visitor. Walking into this small, single-room gallery, one is confronted with an expression of that quiet moment of intimacy; the head and the tail and inside, the body. Two tempting paintings are Ellie MacGarry’s Saturday and Yujin Jung’s I think we are being a cake. Both are groups of people anonymous enough to be one person multiplied (and maybe that’s the point). Each person in each painting is holding hands with another, like they’ve found a way to know each other irrespectively – their canvas communities linking and clinking as never-ending chains. One of Saturday’s long hands is fading away; but for now, she’s here.

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 the dullness like splatters in a blurred vision. I wonder if this is some unsure childhood memory, or an imagining of peoples whose inky stains bleed freely into the next, where static losses can be shared, moved, spun.

There is a conversation in this room between closeness and distance; a longing search for a faraway meaning and a closer, familiar pattern of routine. 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, one who found their way here, in through the skylight, and rested on a pipe like a pausing insect. 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 modes of knowing on their backs. The people here are overflowing, making shape of their desires and the lacks that come with them. There is, perhaps, no attempt to understand, instead to create, calmly, in the face of not knowing – a state that is only as far away as you allow it to be.

It’s in this honest and gentle practice that visitors can find nourishment in the unknown. For these artists, too, are visitors, driven to sustain themselves in their solitude, impregnate with a clear, and often fracturing, hope that is as immediate as friendship and as intangible as an imprint in the sand.