Skin of a Feeling brings together Nanci Byrne, Sophie Smorczewski, Dominika Hofman, and Bunny Hennessey in a group exhibition that explores painting as a responsive, unstable surface — one that holds sensation, memory, and psychic tension rather than resolving them. Across differing styles and tempos, each artist treats the painted surface as a living membrane: porous, bodily, and shifting. Painting becomes less a fixed image than a process of emergence, where forms appear and dissolve and meaning is felt before it’s defined.
Nanci Byrne begins from ornament and decorative language, turning pattern and repetition into vehicles for psychological unease. Drawing on textile and tapestry traditions, her work exposes the tension between surface beauty and the relentlessness of mother/womanhood.
Sophie Smorczewski’s abstracted landscapes use handmade pigments and organic matter to trace cycles of decay and renewal. Rooted in observation and memory, her paintings act as living records of ecological fragility and time.
Dominika Hofman navigates the threshold between visibility and concealment, merging realism and surrealism through layered process and light. Her figures emerge gradually, rewarding prolonged attention.
Bunny Hennessey paints through motion and intuition, letting gesture translate sensation into matter. Her energetic marks evoke the body’s exertion and afterimage rather than its depiction.
Together, these artists reveal painting as transformation — where decoration turns psychological, landscape becomes memory, and gesture registers the body’s inner weather. Skin of a Feeling locates painting in flux: a site of tension, renewal, and lived sensation.
