Margot Samel is pleased to present Life Hum, a solo exhibition of new works by the Scotland-based Amy Winstanley (b. 1983, Dumfries, UK). This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Life Hum refers to the constant humming movement of all matter, from a social to a molecular level. In each painting, through every moment, life is jittering, fluctuating, wavering, vibrating, and oscillating. Winstanley merges an improvisational, intuitive, and observant practice, with a kind of essayistic way of building bodies of work, painting across multiple canvases at once to allow some to become more figurative–thesis-like–and others to sit within their textures and abstractions. Specific works even appear to echo each other, acting like modifiers or prepositions through their compositions like in We Want to be Useful, and Kind, 2025, and While We Wait, and Fruit, 2025. This method stresses an interconnected-ness that Winstanley is invested in while the whole exhibition mimics broader synchronistic choreographies of life. The present is a resonance of everything that was and everything that will be; it is a kind of constant, multi-layered, always unfolding, messy middle ground.
The artist often works closely with literary references while in the studio. For this body of work, she pulls from writer Bayo Akomolafe’s, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, which consists of a series of philosophical letters to the writer’s daughter on the comings and goings of living today. The motifs, palettes, and subjects that emerge in Winstanley’s paintings are in part inspired by his circular views of time, and act like conductive tuning forks which place Winstanley within life hum. For example in, They Are Just in the Other Room, 2025, she recalls an anecdote in reference to the life and death of family members; rather than their disappearance from our lives, their passing is really as though they are in a room next door. Texts like these remind us that life is everpresent, it comes and goes and comes again. All things return to us eventually, or ask that we re-meet them in new and surprising ways. Painting here acts as a carrier for ancient knowledge emerging in the ‘now,’ helping mediate external and sometimes seemingly unmanageable changes.
Life hum becomes a way to envision links between ourselves and the greater orders of the natural world that we are a part of. To imagine the vastness of time as that of the Earth itself, the works in the exhibition move between micro and macro articulations of energy, matter, and exchange. Throughout Winstanley’s greater practice, as with the present, nothing is ever truly separated, isolated, or individuated from something else. The entire interconnected universe, from the whirring of molecules all around to the ghosts and gods of generations past and future happen at once, in textured color fields, brushes of lines, or glowing light sources cast off-frame. Rather than a space of relativity, this becomes a space of spiritual residence–as in throwing oneself into a cold lake–a total and clarifying experience of becoming, like language or painting itself. —Emily Small
