From Woolf to Carver, Shakespeare to McFarlane, Xanthe Muston employs literature as a starting point to explore surreal moments of human connection. Some paintings are vignettes of everyday happenings. Others capture sleepless scenes of the domestic interior and the figures who inhabit them. What unites her work is a shared exploration of what 'home' means in 2024: What does it mean to connect in a 'post-covid' world, in a world backdropped with crisis – economic, social, and ecological – that stubbornly leaks into the foreground? And how might this tension be crystallised in the place that is supposed to offer a withdrawal from the public world, where home is a place of peace?

image: XantheMuston, Beyond the Fence, 2023, watercolour, gouache, ink, and carbon transfer on paper, image courtesy and © the artist.