Garance Bray | Tom Halsall |
Katie Kaur | Jennifer Nieuwland |
Madeleine O’Donnell | Ngai Ning Yu

Curated by Yue Yu and Yiran Zhu
 
Body serves as a subject through which the world is experienced and an authentic documentation of one’s memories, emotions, personal stories, as well as intergenerational histories. It is not solid or fixed, but rather always in flux, defined as much as by the changes as by the presence. While being accustomed to materiality, the internal space, which is felt not seen, is sometimes overlooked and requires more attention.

To further explore the power embedded in one’s body, Tiderip’s upcoming exhibition Vital Void invites six painters whose practices put bodies into time and space, realistic, imaginary or otherwise, to create narratives which both are true to individuals and evoke collective resonance. Through the paintings we’re exhibiting, we want to explore what a body contains, look into its limitations and boundaries, investigate its relation to the larger socio-geographical context. By going back to the essentials, we try to provide an opportunity for the audience to rethink about our own beings and existences.





Featuring Artists

Garance Bray (b.1997, Montpellier, France) seeks to give form to internal landscapes: feelings, memories, embodied perceptions through painting. She is interested in what escapes, spills over, or resists being pinned down. Her practice creates a space where unspoken or unseen parts of experience can emerge in a messy, complex and lively way.

Tom Halsall (b.1999, Lancaster, UK) received an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2025. His paintings interrogate the definition of human body and explore bodies beyond the finite limits of flesh and bone. He investigates into the superstructure of contemporary society and the substructures within that and their influence on human bodies. He seeks to articulate the idea that these systems are not separate from us; they are extensions of ourselves, shaped by human constructs. By warping, distorting, and merging the human body, and incorporating both learned and invented symbols, his paintings take on an ethereal, mythic quality—linking it to the indeterminate metaphysical body.

Katie Kaur (b.2000) is a British artist of Indian and European descent, based in London. Her work is drawn to the sensation of being underwater—a liminal space where light murmurs overhead and time slows into liquid silence. Water is central to her research, inspired by the metaphorical weight of the Punjabi river: a force that gives and takes, heals and divides, flows and endures. She paints ghost-like figures drifting through fluid landscapes, suspended between feeling and dream. Through a reductive palette and layered washes on hand-stitched canvas, Kaur evokes intangible emotional states and the slow passage of time.

Jennifer Nieuwland (b.1977) graduated with an MA in Fine Art from City and Guilds of London Art School in 2021. Her practice explores the weirdness and vulnerability of living in a body, seeking to excavate the intangible sensory register that lies deep within our physical and psychic selves. Her idiosyncratic painterly language is variously lumpy, scratched, fleshy, acting in visceral ways while in other instances it is soft, translucent, conveying moments of introspection, fragility and comfort. These material antinomies echo the tensions, paradoxes and intricacies within her implicitly female experience, while disrupting the logic of her narrative and allowing universal meanings to emerge.

Madeleine O’Donnell (b.2000, Birmingham, UK) weaves elements of abstraction into expressive, textured compositions that blur the line between the real and the imagined, dissolving the boundaries between seen and felt in her paintings. She draws inspiration from both dreams and lived experience. She references to her own photograph taken on travels or in natural settings, and recreates them with personal interpretations, where surreal elements and imagined scenes coalesce. She delves into psychological and emotional atmospheres, constructing immersive, layered worlds where familiarity and estrangement coexist. Through intuitive mark making and rich surfaces, her paintings invite viewers to step beyond the physical world and into something more intangible and felt, converging
internal and external realities.

Ngai Ning Yu’s (b.2003) practice explores the notion of ‘home’, not as a fixed location but as an emotional space of belonging, where memory can be revisited through shadow. She works from photographs and memories of significant places she has inhabited. The figures are never directly painted, instead, they are seen through their shadow silhouettes, or obstructed by another layer of space, existing only as an echo to reflect on her sense of nostalgia and loss towards a certain time and place.