This Gloaming
Nick Fox, Hannah Maybank
Preview: Wednesday 18 November 5-8pm
19 November – 12 December 2026
Nick Fox, Circle of Love, 2024, cyanotype, coloured pencil and 24 carat gold on paper, 84x119cm
‘This Gloaming’ brings together artists Hannah Maybank and Nick Fox in a conversation around the unstable life of images, objects and symbols. United by a shared fascination with flowers, materiality and mythology, the exhibition explores how familiar forms can accumulate meanings beyond their immediate appearance – becoming repositories for memory, desire, intimacy and transformation.
At the heart of the exhibition is a sense of bridging: between the tangible and the imagined, the living and the remembered, preservation and change. Across the exhibition, things are never quite what they seem. A flower becomes a symbol; an object carries the traces of a life; a precious surface records the passage of time.
For Hannah Maybank, the tradition of still life provides a point of departure, but stillness is continually unsettled. Drawing directly from flowers grown and observed in her own garden, Maybank works with delicate watercolour and silver leaf, allowing the material itself to become part of the subject. As the silver leaf tarnishes, its colour changes over time, meaning the paintings register their own ageing. The still life becomes a living thing – an image that continues to develop beyond the moment of its making.
Her recent body of work, ‘Stories from the Glass Harp’, extends this interest in memory and materiality into the domestic realm. Made by fusing fugitive plant dyes and pigments with more permanent mineral pigments, the works focus on vessels: glasses, vases and mugs that belonged to Maybank’s family and were collected over generations. These objects are alive with the past – things that were held, touched and used, and which now carry the traces of absent hands. Their surfaces become vessels for untold memories, holding a quiet tension between presence and loss, and between the physical intimacy of touch and its impossibility in the present.
In Parallel, and in her new work Psyche and The Robin, Maybank quietly references a family vase and the ‘ghosts’ of window nets from her grandparents’ cottage. These silent picture planes become witnesses to histories and the passing of time, while the changing silver surface records that passage as a physical form of memory.
Hannah Maybank, Titan – King Tide Undertow, 2021, Japanese pigmented glass and Gofun white in watercolour on stained watercolour paper over polyester, 115x100cm
Nick Fox, Inferno ii (hazel flower), 2024, cyanotype, water-based size and 24 carat gold-leaf on heritage-rag paper, 101.2x68.6cm
Nick Fox similarly considers how objects and images can become charged with meanings that exceed their material form in relation to the complexities of intimate personal relationships. His practice draws on literature, folklore, mythology, queer histories and systems of symbolic communication. In his recent ‘Inferno’ series, cyanotype becomes a resonant process: large sheets of paper, exposed to imagery sourced through site visits to mythological and sacred spaces, are manually developed in water, gradually materialising into visibility.
Other elements – delicate drawings, gilded flowers, knots and enigmatic golden forms – are painted or drawn on the paper’s surface as ambiguous votives, tokens of lust, devotion or loss. In the large-scale work Flames to Apollo, part of the ‘Inferno’ series, bodies emerge from mysterious landscapes and move through the sacred space, while the presence of floating golden flame emojis reference votive offering as well as symbols used in casual cruising and hook-up apps. These familiar signs become conduits for storytelling, creating covert narratives around desire, loss and the uncertainties of emotional connection.
This process of emergence echoes Fox’s interest in forms of emotional and sexual communication that have historically been displaced from direct expression into coded languages of signs, symbols and objects. His exploration of floriography – the language of flowers – alongside handkerchief codes from queer subculture, knots and emojis, traces the resilience and slipperiness of visual communication as a means of expressing and materialising desire, intimacy, and longing, giving rise to a keen sense both of the pleasures and the limits of double meanings in the construction of codes.
Gold and silver leaf provide a material correspondence between the two artists. Neither employs precious metal simply as ornament. Maybank’s silver is deliberately vulnerable to change, making time physically present within the work. Fox’s use of gold draws on gilding, illuminated manuscripts and the historical associations of precious materials, while also functioning as a symbolic and emotional conductor. In both practices, material beauty is inseparable from meaning.
Flowers offer another point of connection. In Maybank’s work, botanical forms are closely observed from life in pencil before being transformed through paint and metal leaf and made subject to the passage of time. In Fox’s work, flowers can operate as coded tokens whose meanings shift between historical, cultural and personal contexts. Both artists are drawn to the moment when the familiar becomes a carrier of something less visible.
This shared territory creates a productive tension between preservation and transformation, revelation and concealment. Maybank’s objects preserve traces of lives and use; Fox’s symbols preserve forms of communication that might otherwise disappear. One looks towards the accumulated memory of things, the other towards the coded possibilities of things. Both ask how meaning survives, changes and becomes visible.
Maybank and Fox have known each other for more than 30 years, connected through shared interests and the many crossovers of their lives. This longstanding affinity is reflected in the intimate works, A History of Touch and Love’s Sigh 7, which hang side by side within the exhibition. Both works are made through acts of intimate human touch: the touch of a finger as a work is made and installed; the blow of a kiss; a breath, as a memory is blown in gold dust and made to attach itself to the concrete world.
In A History of Touch, Maybank frames the subtle image of a living heirloom peony. In Love’s Sigh 7, Fox presents the barely visible depiction of the rarely witnessed night-flowering cereus. Together, the works hold traces of human connection – between the makers, the work, the installer and, ultimately, the viewer. Through touch, breath, memory and living things, ‘This Gloaming’ makes intimacy gently visible.
The exhibition takes its title from the uncertain light between day and night: a threshold in which things remain recognisable while simultaneously becoming strange. It is a fitting space for two practices concerned with what lies between appearance and meaning, presence and memory, visibility and concealment. Here, flowers bloom and fade, objects remember, symbols migrate and surfaces change. Mythologies and symbolic forms become vessels through which histories of desire, memory, intimacy and transformation can be imagined. Nothing is entirely still.
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