GABRIELLA BOYD

In 1995, the British philosopher Gillian Rose published Love’s Work, her bright and courageous memoir. She brims with earthy wisdom throughout: ‘You be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power. So what if I die. Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace. That I may desire again.’

Fragility and vulnerability, in Rose’s hands, are not weaknesses. Rather, they are intrinsic to the act of loving, the inevitable consequences of opening oneself fully to another; they mark the courage it takes to inhabit desire and the attendant risk of loss.

The slippage between tenderness and endurance also animates Gabriella Boyd’s new paintings, which explore the fragility and force of connection through dreamlike, corporeal forms. Neither fully figurative nor wholly abstract, her work inhabits a liminal space of intimacy and strength: a porcine ambulance, overlaid with a rib-like structure, speeds through a city at sunset, its interior cradling two small bodies; crystalline shards of light fracture across the canvas, catching and scattering attention; pastel hues streaked with ochre; deconstructed floor plans sprawl across the background, punctuated with stipples and small crosses, a recurring motif in Boyd’s work.

Though there is no concrete narrative or autobiographical story to be gleaned from these paintings, Boyd begins with intuitive marks and gestures guided by her own feelings. Working in the vein of psychoanalytic and Surrealist tradition, her forms emerge from the unconscious drift of association: an inward turn toward the body as the site of knowing.

Boyd observes that the work reveals itself to her slowly throughout the process. The result is organic, both in creation and form: soft, sinewy structures that edge towards corporeality. In Love’s Work, too, Rose writes to collapse the porous boundary between internal and external life through her majestic prosody. There is first the literal circumstance of her illness – a body under siege – and then the matter of her unflinching self-exposure. She captures a life vibrant yet imperilled, a clear mind and a heart open, betrayed by the flesh.

Love is not idealised or consoling; it is fallible and exacting, a precarious and devastating work that demands a constant, unsentimental reckoning with failure and loss.

So rigorously attentive to cadence, Rose, at times, approaches the elliptical meter of poetry, her medium of choice: ‘Poetry’s its own agon that allows us to recognise devastation as the rift between power and powerlessness.’ Yet herein also lies poetry’s impossible demand: to render an irreducibly individual experience both visible and intelligible, so that it can be shared and known by others. Boyd enacts a similar revelation through painting.

The constitutive tension of her work is recovering the self-containment of each piece with the unity they create in concert; unity sustained through the restless mediation of the universal, the particular, and the singular. Fragility, in Boyd’s work, is a conscious exposure, a negotiation with impermanence, and a measure of courage that renders life, and art, luminous in its precarity. ‘It is power to be able to attend, powerful or powerless,’ Rose writes; ‘it is love to laugh bitterly, purgatively, purgatorially, and then to be quiet.’

– Katie Anne Tobin, 2025