New solo exhibition by British artist John O'Carroll
O’Carroll’s most recent body of work, Between Stillness (2026), responds to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Hampi in Karnataka, India. Hampi is a place of rocks and rivers, a dramatic ancient landscape of huge granite boulders stacked on top of one another in impossible formations. Winding through the sun-baked rock clusters are the sacred waters of the Tungabhadra River. A place of deep geological time, of battles between the gods, of fallen empire, everyday agriculture, and spiritual pilgrimage. Between Stillness is composed, in part, of a series of large steel-framed panels alive with movement. Using a combination of pigment, brass leaf and acids, the surface of each panel echoes the crystalline texture of rock, the iridescent interplay of light on water, and the patina of aged artefacts. The pigments seep through the layers of oxidised brass leaf beyond the artist’s control. As O’Carroll notes, ‘The materials talk, they have a language and creation of their own.’ Boulder-like forms tumble across the surface, encircled and carried by fluid painterly strokes. Using Japanese mulberry paper, the rounded forms appear not as solid and fixed, but as if memories, translucent and shifting. Simultaneously microcosmic and macrocosmic, they slip between the cellular, planetary, and imaginary. As if migrating from the landscape panels, five curved repetitions of the boulder-like motif also wander the space. Drenched in colour, they become gem-like and talismanic.