Opening: Friday  31.10.2025, 7pm
TALK: Sunday  2.11.2025, 2-4pm: 
Lu Rose Cunningham (London) in conversation
with Ricarda Denzer and TC McCormack

The exhibition is accompanied by a booklet containing
a text by Lu Rose Cunningham and a conversation between Ricarda Denzer and TC McCormack.

ricardadenzer.net

tcmccormack.co.uk

Where Did We Leave Off From

a textual response by Lu Rose Cunningham
a positioning towards TC McCormack and Ricarda Denzer’s ‘This Is Where We Go The Distance and This Is Where We Stick’

Two modes of working, on and below the surface, developing over time and returned to. Stark and dis-assembled, or grown, layered and dense. Re-etched gestures; the palimpsest, peeling back to a distant Before only to come back to Now. Caught by something here, but one’s touch still lingering in something no longer. Embracing and losing, like standing on the periphery looking back into a room on the other side of a glass partition. Or standing inside looking out, searching. A meeting of eyes / I’s / me’s and you’s, this object and that. Call it conversation, or alluding to. Pulsating fragments of images, people in and out of the room looking at the works, at other people, at TC and R acknowledging one another through line and voice. The picture of reality, always shifting. From one positionality to another, a sense of back and forth, a reciprocity or removal. Syllables hanging between the walls, once-had and yet-to-be conversations. Painting enlivened beyond the frame; mid-air sequences and configurations of time and place notated and re-arranged. The space in which we stand vibrates — I note transitory moments, and my own inner ones, the room and objects in it a passage, a sounding body.

*

From one side of the space, a disembodied voice emerges, expressing here we turn, once again. An announcement of movement, things in flux, but perhaps(?) wishing to converge. Relations and alliances, to a strategy of deferral. A continuous line escaping closure, like a moth in spiral, in search for a fixed point of light. Light as in a(n) (un)known quasi-object, not quite concrete, resting — but only for a moment — like breath, like utterances breaking from the mouth. The trace of something that has been, a form departed, questioning whether absence has been registered. For the action of absence also infers presence at some moment, suggests nearness, possibly affecting, arresting. Seemingly immutable surfaces — shaped something like grass, concrete, sky — almost-changed through almost-contact. Boundaries tested, convergence a ritual. I never quite know where I myself am situated, embodying oscillation, the friction between distance and intimacy. Through these unnamed entities, only ever described as something like ‘Discrete’ or ‘Quasi-near’ I undergo feelings of misplacement or reaching for a placeholder, wanting to keep up. States of confusion then [un]ease, then compulsion. Wishing for a linkage, registering closeness as though it stems from an unreachable satellite, traversing vastness in search of a tangible other. Feelings of attachment or lack of, my following of language fracturing.

I never do reach what the thrumming thread is here we (don’t) speak of; where it comes from, who or what it reaches for. Rather, I’m moving with its outline slowly, witnessing progress, a gradual interlocking / weaving / searching for alignment of where to posit the self, of what is encountered along the way, why each connection. Subject matter is emptied out at points, presenting abstracted vignettes and a sense of momentum, a constant chasing after. The word attachment comes like fog, denying a permanent hold. Existence of a thing — the self? — as a series of motions through rotations; a series of motions through words, conversation a series of circumnavigations. Dialogue as working out exactitudes through in-exactness, through waiting, weighting, adapting. Having made various angles – to achieve that position.
A constant thread, thrumming — the line takes me for a walk, as the line is taken itself walking through the act of drawing, and I it through the act of following / citing / siting, the line traversing exact on the projected surface.

I never do reach what the object is — a constant withholding to subject matter, emptied out over the course of the material’s making, a film reworked multiple times, with each iteration seeing something taken out, the act of redaction / reworking / stripping back, something akin to truth. Asking what is at stake in revealing or keeping back. A singularity amidst other singularities. I sense myself grasping, becoming, offering up my own version of events.

*

Thinking about the pause between phone dial tones. The pause before someone answers, picking up a frequency. Where did we leave off from. Pause. Conversing bookended with a tension. Notations of voice and impact through time, the undulations and wavering. A long-term documentary one might call their engagements, with another, or themselves, a sonic / textual / visual mapping of a situation. How we interact, speculate, take note, enact. Additions and redactions, stutters and embellishments, as though a painting. An experience of colour, pace, urgency. Existence as speech as trajectories. Thinking having a voice, voice a body. A collective positionality, sought with and via another. Voicing something, not only an act of communication, but one of displacement. Having made various angles – to achieve that position. We speak across time and space, continuous grappling, meeting, eventual diverging. Casually, we’re talking, listening, acknowledging, but internally I’m thinking what does my own line of thought and felt-tip-being look like, does it come ragged and electric or a series of soft continuous marks. Like the language of migraine auras, intangible but intensely felt. Distracted again by cognitive musings. I retune my ear.

She presents her ‘Telephone Paintings’, and I listen, write after, make my own penned composite of phrases, breaks, directions. Coloured or filled-in squares now paintings, paintings as a series of murmurations / murmurs / continuous noise. In talking about the act of responding via mark-making, orality continues. Another act of conversing, holding regard for and editing, re-considering; objects formed through decisions made whilst acknowledging an existing object, background image and sound too. Voices around and within. Object upon object upon object, forever impacting. Acrylic index of site-specificity, read as a register of senses. Marks smeared and edges blurred, an assemblage to decipher, felt like the anticipation of what will be conveyed between exchanges. Inhale, exhale. Painting as the grain of voice and air finding one another, or not, in the choice to articulate with another entity. The communal — what does it mean, Together. To gather. To be in conjunction, simultaneously. Near but not necessarily touching. Room for re-adjustments; an unpredictability, even in familiar comfort. Discrete and quasi-near.

*

A meeting of eyes / I’s / me’s and you’s, this object and that. The moment the light refracts across the room / object / glass surface, coming all reds-blues-greens, reaching both indoor and outdoor and middle unknown, and the forms on all sides of the partition are held at once. This event might draw objects closer. The potential of a horizon; a proximate meeting on it, a relation deepened. Or all might lapse in the next moment, exhausted and unknowable. Departure. Another migration into the sonic and temporal stream. All might turn, once again.