ETERNAL RETURN

Naomi Bishop understands that the eye is always looking for a place to rest but that the spirit is restless. In her paintings, timescales layer, matter and light splitting her objects-ritual, magical, into dimensions beginning here but ending someplace just beyond us. These paintings have been shaped by travels across three continents.

They bring together the sheer crystalline force of Finland’s winter daylight, the damp edges of Taipei’s forests the occasional drama of our own dry scrub’s sandpaper heat. These paintings come alive in this way, a portal opens up between them and us. For Naomi perhaps they exist as a kind of map, for us they are a trail.

-Text by Emily Stewart, excerpt from the essay “Geomancy” 2016