At the core of this exhibition is a body of work which began in spring 2025, during the artist’s two-month residency at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall. This beachside haven became a site of solitary inquiry, where the unfolding present, immediate landscape and Kuschke’s own personal histories converged in painting to evoke a spirit of place. In her gestural approach to landscape, her canvases map this meeting between inner geography and external environment.

Growing up between South Africa and London, Kuschke cultivated a sensitivity to place. In Cornwall, living near the ocean awakened memories of Kuschke’s childhood in South Africa, reviving a heightened attentiveness to nature’s cues and early fascination with how water, rocks and shells reveal the material effects of time. In London where Kuschke resides, noise is intrusive and often suppressed; in Cornwall however, sounds, light and tidal cycles became anchors for her canvases. Observing fishing boats, Kuschke studied the outlines left behind by their tow lines on the sand, echoes of which are traceable in her paintings; her mark-making and forms move toward resolution, only to dissolve into successive, shifting lines. At Porthmeor, the southernmost region of mainland UK, flooded with light said to ‘lift the shadows’, her surroundings entered the studio walls through a vast pitched-roof skylight. The paintings capture this clear, brilliant light – maximising the inherent glow of oil, creating a sense of autogenous radiance.

For Kuschke, creating such large-scale paintings is a sustained physical performance. These works begin the moment she makes the painting’s ‘support’ – constructing the frame, stretching and grounding the canvas. As she explains, ‘it is never a blank canvas’. Even before paint is applied, she builds the work – materially and conceptually – a stage which is integral to the final resolve. Through a highly-planned spontaneity, Kuschke then layers and erases urgent scores of paint in an ongoing dialogue between artist and material. Marks become buried into the surface: ‘I treat the support as a witness to my body.’ Describing her practice of mark-making and drawing-in-space, Kuschke observes, ‘at some point in the process, a scene or event jumps out at me as something that is familiar, and the responsibility then, is to capture that’.

If Cornwall encouraged Kuschke to tend to the current moment, this development expresses a countervailing impulse to the historical rootedness already present in her work. Informed by personal archives; Cornish mythologies; South African folkloric stories; and the writings of Antjie Krog, Breyten Breytenbach and James Matthews, Kuschke gathers extensive, esoteric research which she translates into visual language. As streams of feeling and knowledge emerge on the surface of the canvas, this exhibition brings together a perceptual investigation into real and past time.

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