With extraordinary technical skill and meticulous attention to light and form, Louise Hearman depicts familiar subjects – children, animals, clouds, and shifting landscapes – yet renders them uncanny, creating an illusory reality that we can comprehend but never truly experience. Her works act as cinematic glimpses into her own personal memory and imagination – blurring the lines between the known and the unknowable – and inviting us, as viewers, to consider the depths of our own imagination.
Transforming everyday imagery into dreamlike visions, a face in the clouds or a shadow at twilight can be both intimate and ungraspable. Her paintings do not tell stories, nor do they dictate meaning; instead, they elicit a visceral response, drawing us into their ambiguity.
Using a visual language shaped by observation and imagination, Hearman’s work is at once deeply personal and universally resonant. Devoid of titles and explanations, her paintings remind us that art can speak in ways words cannot.
– Tallulah Smith, 2025
View exhibition