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I Seek Your Softness
Tender Explorations of Paint -
"Softly, hand near hand, skin near skin, here we are."
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Simona Stone writes: I Seek Your Softness brings together four painters: Kay-Leigh Fisher, Joëlle Joubert, Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne, and Dineo Ponde, whose work explores the energy of intimacy and care. In quiet gestures, their paintings reach toward tenderness, marking a shared longing for warmth, connection, and presence in a world that feels increasingly sharp. The exhibition responds to this moment with gentleness, holding space for vulnerability, and honours the subtle, bodily transfers, of love, of comfort, that pass between us.
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Form, gesture and surface are integral to appreciation of the paintings in I Seek Your Softness, some marked by delicate layering, others by broad, expressive strokes. Unlike overtly conceptual practices, the works in this exhibition turn inward, drawing from embodied processes and the quiet intimacies of daily life. The painters approach the canvas as a site of emotional exchange, where care, vulnerability and presence take material form.
One recurring concern binds this varied body of work: the search for softness in a world that feels increasingly brittle. For these artists, tenderness is not simply a mood, but a method, an active reaching toward others, and toward the self. In paint, they chart the boundaries between bodies and emotions, between solitude and support.
Here, softness is not a retreat, but a proposition.
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The paintings in I Seek Your Softness are built through gesture, repetition and restraint. Surfaces are layered, scraped back, and layered again. Colour moves from muted washes to dense, saturated passages. There is attention in the brushwork, a kind of care made visible in how the paint sits, holds, and sometimes pulls away.
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