The Restless Surge of the Liquid State is a solo exhibition by Karen David which reimagines the gallery as an active laboratory of signs and signifiers, combining fictions, autobiography and material facts. The exhibition takes its name from a chapter in the 1969 Time-Life pocketbook on Matter, where it speaks of the mutable nature of liquid, being the ‘middle child’ of solids and gases. In this exhibition this in-between, transitionary, fluid nature of liquidity is present in the modes of display where process, presentation and studio borders merge, and fiction, autobiography and art-making temporarily occupy the same space, merging and swirling and surging restlessly as one shared enquiry.

The works on display occupy this liquid state where we witness, albeit frozen in time, pigment swirling together restlessly, as they reach upwards resembling patisserie, seashells, psychedelia and cellular nodes all at once. These works act as material facts amongst a tapestry of fictions and personal narratives, immiscible with each other.

A gilded ley line runs through the space, aligning and activating earth energies. Photographs of landscapes are captured in an obsidian mirror, and a film by the artist shows the sky above Roswell, New Mexico. Displayed on shelves are shiny, bulbous ceramics, a collection of soap ends and crystals, as well as self-portraits as characters from films by the artist herself with varying degrees of verisimilitude. Paintings, ceramics and photographs are active experiments, as the laboratory searches for a way to capture hidden energies in material.

Reminiscent of both modernist exhibition structures and the memory of a 1980s bedroom, the installation crosses the clean lines and coloured walls of Bauhaus interiors. A calendar from 1986 hangs on the wall just before we enter the back space with its dates synchronising to our current time zone. In this back space, we encounter glass cabinets that play out scripts from David’s fiction The Commune of the Viable Essence; one cabinet a storeroom in the imagined commune, but holding objects from David’s personal collection, and the other a window to the commune’s shop, its contents glimpsed through a set of partially drawn curtains.

David is drawn to mythopoesis technologies and here examines the static space that exists between fiction and actuality as an imaginative, liquid space for future thinking and regeneration.