Artists: Kasia Wozniak - Johanna Bath - Julien Parant-Marquis - Harry Hugo Little - Emma Beatrez - Imogen Allen

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds… the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn…

Consequently the colour of everything that's empty; blue bottles, bank accounts’

“We have no pain, but we have lost all pleasure, and the lip that meets our lip is always one half of our own. Our state is exactly the name of precisely nothing, and our memories, with polite long faces, come to view us and to say to one another that we never looked better; that seems at last at peace; that our passing was - well - sad - still - doubtless for the best (all this in a whisper lest the dead should hear). Disappointment , constant loss, despair .... A taste, a soft quality in the air, a cooler, aflutter: permanent in their passage. We were not up to it. We missed it. We could not retain it. It will never be back. Joy-breaking gloom continues to hammer. So it’s true: Being without Being is blue.”

Inspired by William Gass’s philosophical text, ‘On Being Blue’, this exhibition, ‘Being Without Being is Blue’, explores the link between melancholia and intimacy. Following the listomania that features in Gass’ work in an attempt to describe something that is unseen, the artists cover the bridge of making tangible the feeling of melancholic intimacy in their work.

The artists capture this intangible feeling and the marked poverty of language in its inability to describe this in-between emotional state, through both symbols and a blurred ethereal quality to their works which lead us to believe that images that may serve us better as description that words; the only way to say is to see.

An obsession with lists in the book seeps into the exhibition as items materialise in the paintings in the space. The lists represent the flow and overflow of excessive abundance, and the dizzying myriad of possibilities of feeling that are available to us; Butterflies flap their wings, a horizon is punctured with a star, as a carousel whirls whilst a bouquet of flowers is thrusted into frame. These images stalk one after the other across the walls of the exhibition like a picture flip book whilst the movement that blurs across each work creates a heady sensation of memories just out of reach.