Everard Read Cape Town | A Gentle Entanglement

Everard Read is pleased to present A Gentle Entanglement by Nicola Bailey. 

A solo exhibition by Cape Town artist Nicola Bailey. ‘A Gentle Entanglement’ features sculptures – from delicate and embryonic to monumental – as well as figurative yet supple paintings, all exploring our deep connections with others.

Lucienne Bestall comments: “To say that Nicola Bailey’s practice turns on love reveals little of its seductions – the tenderness of her lines, her figurative sensibility, the texture of her affections. It is perhaps more precise to say that it turns on a particular loving, not as a lofty abstraction but as an accumulative verb of quiet devotion.

More precisely still: Bailey’s practice turns on the deeply felt mutual affinity she shares with her dogs…Pursuing an affective encounter with significant otherness, the artist’s material engagements give form to feeling. Of her paintings of sleeping canines, Bailey writes: “My animal companions and I spend many hours asleep, our dreams comingling. How do these lucid musings dissolve the porous boundaries we have constructed?” The cast bronze roses may be a symbol of romantic love, but “the artist follows an expanded understanding of romance, which reaches beyond the image of paired lovers to other unions: that of mother and child, animal and animal, human and non-human,” writes Bestall. She goes on to describe how Bailey’s latest offering is “a bid against loss and solitude,” with the aim of generating empathy, care and compassion for everyone around us.

The show runs from 9 November - 30 November 2023.