The molten, solemn forms that are in Rose Shuckburgh’s watercolors have an odd relationship with representation. In Cynefin (a Welsh term approximating the meaning of the word “habitat”), a blue, amorphous figure recedes lightly from its dark murk of setting. One small semicircle of black blinks dimly near the figure’s center; this is either a gap or an island. An odd bump here and a slow protuberance there give the bright daub an organic, maybe a human, tinge, with bleeding edges and the whole empty space below. A solitary pond aglow on a night’s mountain meadow — a stripped, pathetic embrace, reworked nude and darkling.

To feel these paintings is to meet them at their lonely spot between the breath in of being a thing and the breath out of becoming a form — these paintings are very much like aspiration. Akin to the sinewed stain in Cynefin, the obelisk in Standing lurches forward as would an enemy, or tips back like a toppled tree. Held has an eyeless urchin which might just be an iceberg. Under, Over, Cwn Elan, so named for Wales’s Elan Valley (“Cwn Elan”), makes its subject, a hill, lap from the pond below it like a massive, greedy dog. Shuckburgh makes uncanny portraits whose subjects are the very things, unveiled, that portraits try to do: coerce us into identifying with forms utterly alien; trick us towards feeling from a flat unfeeling page. In this way, though, they’re at once guileless and mystifying, empathic like sharing the air with an unknown thing in a dark room.

Shuckburgh’s three monoprints also suspend themselves like an inhalation between the things the artist sees and what her art would have us see. Resting is the word resplendent. Loop is human but barely so. In Alongside, curiously, the same form from Cynefin (made one year earlier) returns a bit clarified: it’s a puddle about to be splashed in, it seems, but held (like a breath) right before this would happen. The wavering mass and its mottled surround beg, in this instant, to be read, but ooze around a meaning like mud through fingers at night. All’s left is to breathe them in.

- Troy Sherman