Gaia Ozwyn:

Incantations to a

Vague Borderland

22 May - 19 June, 2025

PV: Wednesday, 21 May, 6 - 8 pm

And to the sunken dark, I had sent all the light I knew

An essay by Matthew Holman

Gaia Ozwyn’s most recent body of work, brought together under the title Incantations to a Vague Borderland, might appear to imagine merely the otherworldly provinces of the distant cosmos, and to reflect upon a possible world or worlds beyond the one we know now. On the surface, these are paintings of skies and paradise, the empyrean and the arcadian rolled into one. The title itself gestures towards the immaterial transformations of magic, spells, and charms while remaining directed, like an address across a continent, to the very specific topographies and to the overlap between two countries or areas. However, if one spends enough time with these pictures, one realises that they are not pure works of the imagination seeking to find form and colour in some distant hinterland extraneous to us but are grounded in our shared experience of living in a corporeal and ageing body, and an immediate world, which is perpetually in flux. 

Above all, Ozwyn’s pictures depict those sites of conflict and tension, borderlands between different states. ‘The art of living is based on rhythm - on give & take, ebb & flow, light & dark, life & death’, reflected the novelist Henry James: ‘By acceptance of all aspects of life, good & bad, right & wrong, yours & mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, “the dance of life”, metamorphosis.’ It is Ozwyn’s capturing of the dance of life, from the magnificent to the mundane, which carries meaning in these works; far less the world to come. 

One of the most striking aspects of Ozwyn’s works is the incorporation of wildly contrasting matter to construct her compositions. The weighted intervention of concrete on the surface of several significant paintings serves to emphasise the juxtaposition of materials; the cold and coarse surface of the building material is at odds with the pure and timeless finish of the oil paint. In her use of extraordinarily contrasting materials, Ozwyn has stressed the influence of Soviet film montage, which its greatest practitioner, Sergei Eisenstein, described as ‘an idea that derives from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another.’ We could describe Ozwyn’s paintings in a similar way: it is through the independence of the elementally disparate forces of the concrete and the oils that they cohere as they do; it is because, not despite, the contrast between the suggestion of celestial sky and earth which places the two materials in a fascinating dialectical relationship. This is not where the sense of struggle ends.

Ozwyn’s surfaces are animated by an extraordinary sense of movement which is created by a complex and counterposed layering of paint which means that objects appear to be flying across space. In this way, the concrete takes on another purpose: like meteorites or comets they appear to be genuinely hurled across the picture plane, creating a dynamic atmosphere of sublime danger. As such, these pictures mediate between three-dimensional sculptural aspects and fierce and painterly mark-making which manage to feel simultaneously substantial and evanescent. 

In these respects, Ozwyn’s celestial vision of the world recalls the magnificent church ceilings of Rome, such as painter-priest Andrea Pozzo’s trompe-l'oeil of Sant’Ignazio which depicts purple cloud formations, pockets of distant sky, and the illusion of objects flying through paradise. One cannot face and to the sunken dark, I had sent all the light I knew (2025) face on, for instance, and not imagine oneself looking vertically up to a world beyond. The deliciously bulbous reds coalesce with the ephemeral oranges and yellows in such a way that it seems as though we are witnessing the merging of primary life forms as the weight of materiality meets the weightlessness of deep time. 

In a similar vein, but only amplified by the wildly ambitious scale, Collapse of the Personal Dimension (2025) proves to be a staggering achievement: the arcing polyptych implies not only the curvature of the earth leading up to the heavens but also the narrative of a figure, a person – perhaps, for the artist, Ozwyn herself – transformed over time. While the title might imply entropic forces that metaphorically overwhelm the subjectivity and sense of the artist’s self, the trajectory of the picture remains more ambiguous. One cannot help but be pulled to read the development of the painting like prose or poetry, with some of the logic of narrative or transformation, as we move from the abject dirt of the off-grey paint which drips to the luscious light beyond.

On the wall of her studio, Ozwyn has tacked several poems, including Anthony Anaxagorou’s ‘Talking to Myself in Halves’, in which the speaker writes: ‘you will ask / wanting the tunnel to explain / its darkness / needing the answer / more than the echo.’ Anaxagorou’s poem asks us to engage on multiple sensorial levels – and to negotiate the darkness against the echo, the seen and the heard – in a way that reminds me of Ozwyn’s paintings. As an artist, Ozwyn envisions those spaces of transformation – the tunnel, the borderland, the periphery, and the perimeter – and what it means to know them not as intermedial spaces but as places where the truth lies.

While on a residency programme at the RCA BLK x Yinka Shonibare Foundation in Lagos, Ozwyn was introduced to the idea of the ecotone by the ethnobotanist Jonn Gale of The Linnean Society of London. The ecotone is the area between two distinct ecological systems, the most salient of which is the mangrove, a tree or shrub which grows in tidal and coastal swamps and thrives in saline conditions and low-oxygen soil. The ecotone has biological significance because it straddles biodiverse systems as an area of great genetic adaptation. This finds a clear corollary in Ozwyn’s paintings. ‘I am interested in what it means to exist in multiple spaces simultaneously’, the artist reflects, ‘but by definition to exist in none of them completely or wholly.’ 

As such, what might be a survival challenge for the organisms in the ecotone – a struggle for survival, as it is – might be, in Ozwyn’s view, ‘what ultimately gives us more dimension, and overall leads to a survival benefit.’ Ultimately, Ozwyn’s paintings are paintings of extraordinary metamorphosis: they manage to carry over what it means to change, not as either pure possibility or threat, but as a necessary condition of being alive. 

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