Fracture: Painting, Ontology, and the Liminal Discipline of Technique
In October 2026, Fracture will open as my latest exhibition, a project that consolidates a trajectory beginning with my Salon work Burnsall Winter, developed through Regeneration at The Bowes Museum (2022), and refined in my postgraduate research at the Royal College of Art. Each stage has marked a shift in how I approach the relationship between landscape, material, and perception. What began as a poetic apprehension of place in Burnsall Winterdeepened into a materially grounded inquiry in Regeneration, and has now evolved into Fracture: an exploration of how painterly technique and ontology, so often treated as separate concerns, might be understood as liminal disciplines whose boundaries continually overlap.
The central claim of Fracture is that ontology in painting is not an abstract or discursive category alone, but one that emerges directly from technical organisation. Painterly methods can be physiologically active, technically repeatable, and therefore linked to ontological outcomes. This position is exemplified by the phenomenon of equiluminance—the condition in which colours differ in hue but not in value. When value is equalised while chroma and hue are varied, contours weaken, figure–ground stability diminishes, and the eye drifts across the surface. The perceptual instability produced under these conditions is not speculative but physiological, grounded in the separation of the magnocellular and parvocellular pathways in the visual cortex.¹ Here, a painterly decision (to equalise value while varying hue) becomes not merely an aesthetic effect but a physiological intervention, altering the viewer’s perceptual state. It is in this sense that technē becomes physiologically active, demonstrating that technique is never ancillary to meaning but constitutive of it.
Burnsall Winter: Poetic Apprehension of Place
The first movement in this trajectory was Burnsall Winter, the Médaille d’Argent-winning canvas shown at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris.² At the time, the work was understood as a meditation on the poetics of place. A snow-covered Yorkshire landscape, the painting suspended the viewer between presence and memory, figuration and atmosphere. Its power lay less in description than in poetic apprehension: an evocation of time and place as they are felt rather than mapped.
In retrospect, Burnsall Winter foreshadowed the ontological questions now foregrounded in Fracture. Its fractured surfaces and muted tonalities destabilised the stability of representation, pointing toward a condition in which meaning is not located in the view but in the viewer’s perceptual negotiation of it. The Salon work thus established a foundational concern: that painting’s ontology might reside in the way it mediates between world, material, and perception.
Burnsall Winter, Médaille d’Argent, SNBA ,Salon des Beaux-Arts 2018.
Regeneration: Material Ontology
If Burnsall Winter gestured toward poetic apprehension, Regeneration (Bowes Museum, 2022) was explicitly framed as a study in material ontology.³ The exhibition used household gloss, coal dust, and industrial residues as pigments, embedding the history of the North directly into the surface of the work. Regeneration was a meditation on how paint can embody not just colour but cultural and geological memory.
The show marked a decisive shift from the lyrical towards the ontological. By using non-traditional materials—gloss, ash, coal—the works refused to treat surface as neutral ground. Instead, the paintings became sites where material facticity was inseparable from meaning. This aligned with what I later developed in my RCA research as a theory of material agency: the idea that paint is not a passive vehicle for image but an active collaborator in the making of meaning.
The RCA years gave me the conceptual vocabulary to articulate this. Through seminars on materiality and ontology, I began to frame painting as a practice in which techne and ontology continually overlap. The concept of porosity, central to my thesis, described how boundaries between painter, viewer, and material dissolve. Regeneration was thus both exhibition and experiment: it showed how material choice and technical process shape the ontological resonance of the work.
Fracture: Technique as Ontology
Fracture builds directly from these earlier works but reframes the stakes. If Burnsall Winter foregrounded poetic apprehension and Regeneration explored material ontology, Fracture focuses on the liminality of perception itself. The claim is that painterly ontology emerges directly from technical decisions, and that the organisation of hue, value, surface, and facture can condition the viewer’s perceptual state.
Equiluminance provides the clearest example. Livingstone’s research shows that when chromatic difference is uncoupled from value contrast, the brain’s visual pathways destabilise, creating perceptual drift.⁴ Turner’s late seascapes and Monet’s dissolving atmospheres intuited this effect; Bridget Riley made it explicit. In Fracture, tonal balancing around the edge of equiluminance produces a similar instability: contours soften, figure-ground relations dissolve, and the eye oscillates between fragments. The viewer’s experience of place becomes unstable, liminal, and provisional. Ontology here is not discursive but technical: the being of the work is inseparable from the organisation of paint.
Modernist Lineages
Placing Fracture in a wider lineage clarifies its stakes. Modernism consistently reset landscape painting as a problem of perception rather than a repertory of motifs. Constable’s meteorological empiricism, Cézanne’s dismantling of unitary perspective, and Turner’s atmospherics all sought to realign painting with the flux of perception.⁵
Cézanne is a particularly instructive precedent. His repeated paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire fractured vision into modulated planes of colour, balancing solidity and dissolution. For him, the motif was a laboratory: a site through which to interrogate how perception becomes form.⁶ In Fracture, Penhill functions as a contemporary analogue. Like Cézanne’s mountain, it is not a postcard view but a geological mass that pressurises decisions of mass, range, and void. The difference is telling: where Cézanne fractured perception to rebuild it into order, Fracture embraces irresolution. Vision remains unstable; the image never quite closes.
Northern Modernism: Fell, Ackroyd, Kelly
Fracture also situates itself in a Northern modernist lineage shaped by artists such as Sheila Fell, Norman Ackroyd, and Percy Kelly. Fell’s Cumbrian canvases, with their tonal gravitas and sense of geology weighed before description, provide a model of landscape as structure rather than scene.⁷ Ackroyd’s aquatints distil weather and coast into tonalities of edge and mass, while Kelly’s black-lined architectures insist on the stubbornness of things, refusing the picturesque.⁸
Together, they frame a Northern modernism of restraint, structure, and weather. Fracture extends this tradition by adding entropic materiality. Weight migrates from motif to surface, weather is enacted through facture, and edges dissolve into seams. The north is no longer a backdrop but a pressure system: lived, fractured, and geological.
Monumentality and Moore
A further interlocutor is Henry Moore, whose sculptural engagement with Yorkshire geology provides a way to think about monumentality in Fracture. Monumentality, Moore reminds us, is not size but relation—the balance of mass, void, and contour that allows a small form to carry the gravity of a hill.⁹
In Fracture, tonal apertures and scumbled grounds function like Moore’s voids: not absences but positive forms, sites of energy. Surfaces are layered, crushed, and seamed like limestone strata, making the canvas itself a geological construction. This equivalence of painting to sculpture shifts the register: the hill is no longer a view to be looked at, but a mass to be built, endured, and tested.
Fracture and muted tone. study of upper Wharfedale
Ontology as Technical Consequence
What links Burnsall Winter, Regeneration, and Fracture is the recognition that ontology in painting is not external to technique but precipitated by it. In the Salon work, poetic apprehension arose from facture and muted tone; in Regeneration, ontology emerged from material agency; in Fracture, perception itself becomes unstable through technical orchestration.
Greenberg’s dictum of “truth to materials” is re-situated here as “truth to perception’s instability.”¹⁰ Ontological states—ambiguity, sublimity, becoming—are shown to arise directly from the painter’s organisation of surface. As Gombrich argued, perception always completes from fragments; in Fracture, those fragments are literal: seams of dust, tonal thresholds, scumbled voids.¹¹ Ontology is not above technique but carried by it.
The Sublime Re-Apprehended
This technical-ontological framing allows a fresh approach to the sublime in landscape. The Yorkshire Dales, too long fossilised into picturesque cliché, are re-apprehended here as elemental conditions of exposure and pressure. The sublime, in this context, is not bombast but suspension: weather moving across mass, mass enduring weather.
Like Turner’s atmospheric dissolutions, Fracture enacts sublimity through facture and tonal instability.¹² Apertures of ground, scumbled passages, and near-equiluminant zones create perceptual disorientation, releasing the Dales from their postcard destiny and restoring their elemental force.
The forthcoming exhibition Fracture marks the culmination of a trajectory that began with Burnsall Winter’s poetic apprehension of place, developed through Regeneration’s material ontology, and was articulated through research at the RCA into the overlapping of technique and ontology. It proposes that painting should be understood as a liminal discipline in which technical decisions—value, hue, facture, material—are constitutive of ontological meaning.
If Fell gives us weight, Ackroyd weather, and Kelly edge, Fracture brings mass: a Moore-like monumentality, stone-true yet open to air. The show argues that the sublime landscape of the Dales can only be truthfully apprehended when treated not as a view to be framed but as a form to be built, tested, and endured. Only then is the postcard retired and the elemental restored.
Notes
Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York: Abrams, 2002), 55–72.
Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Salon Catalogue (Paris, 2018).
Regeneration exhibition catalogue, The Bowes Museum, 2022.
Livingstone, Vision and Art, 60–62.
John House, Constable and the Pursuit of Nature (London: Tate, 1983).
Richard Shiff, “Cézanne and the Practice of Painting,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 47–65.
Cate Haste, Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (London: Lund Humphries, 2010).
Norman Ackroyd, A Shetland Notebook (London: Royal Academy, 2014); Chris Wadsworth, Percy Kelly: The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Drawing (Carlisle: Bookcase, 2010).
Henry Moore, Writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson (London: Lund Humphries, 2002).
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960), in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 85–93.
E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1960), 181–206.
John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 241–49