August – October 2026 at Wachters Galerie, Knokke, Belgium.
Murmur to the Mud is the second exhibition in an ongoing flower painting series begun in 2013. It started with a single image, flowers growing wild at the edge of a highway, and with something simpler underneath, a plain, overwhelming enjoyment of painting them. The colour a petal holds right at the edge of falling apart, a stem bending under its own weight, spray paint bleeding into a wash of green until the plant and the atmosphere become the same thing, that’s still what gets me into the studio every day, before any of the thinking starts.
The work takes its title, and its spirit, from Samuel Beckett, whose writing I find genuinely uplifting. Beckett’s novel How It Is, written in 1964, stayed with me for years, a voice in the mud, murmuring on regardless, addressing someone who may or may not be listening, never entirely alone in the murmuring. These paintings are an attempt at a spatialisation of that, taking the staging, the rhythm, the sheer beauty of that persistence, and giving it a physical, painted architecture.
A single flower stands for the individual, a group of them for the collective, and standing in front of these, I want the first thing anyone feels to be pleasure, six or seven colours fighting for attention in one small patch of canvas, a bloom rendered so precisely you can feel the weight of every petal. Growth doesn’t wait for permission.
There’s real hope in that.
Wachters Galerie – Golvenstraat 11
8300 Knokke-Heist, Belgium