A Quiet Dichotomy

SaltSpace Gallery, Glasgow 29 October - 3 November 2026

What does it mean to be close to another person?

To depend upon them?

To care for them?

To rest beside them?

Can we be together and still remain partly unknown to one another?

What happens when an image gives us enough to recognise a life, but not enough to understand it?

There is tenderness here, but also unease.
Clarity, and its disappearance.
Connection, and distance.
Rest, and the difficulty of resting in 2026.

A Quiet Dichotomy begins with these contradictions.

Working from an archive of found, institutional and personal photographs, Samantha Wilson returns repeatedly to images of people whose circumstances cannot be entirely known, across time, social status and circumstance.

Through a slow process of painting and drawing, information is removed as often as it is revealed. Bodies emerge and dissolve. 

In this exhibition, new multi-panel paintings experiment with separating the canvas, interrupting bodies and forms that might otherwise remain whole.

Thin washes, soft colour and erasure bring a gentleness to images that may hold something difficult or unresolved. They offer another way of approaching it, one in which vulnerability, care and uncertainty can occupy the same space.

At a moment when so much competes for our attention, Wilson makes slow works that ask for quietness, attention and time. 

Can we remain with an image before deciding what it means?

Can we remain with one another in the same?

Exhibition text by Samantha Wilson, 2026.