Blackbird Rook presents
Dust is made from Skin and Things
Kate Burling
3rd April - 4th May
Blackbird Rook at
The TCHC Viewing Room Gallery
Open by appointment
Kate Burling, Lively Eyes, 2023 Oil on canvas 140 x 110cm
The body is not a closed system. It is porous, soft, and yielding—subject to forces greater than itself. Kate Burling’s paintings linger on this uneasy truth. At first, they appear delicate, their smudged edges and pastel hues suggesting something gentle, almost dissolving. But look closer, and the surface gives way to something more unsettling. Machines slice through flesh. Propellers hum where there should be lungs. Turbines rise, not just from the sea, but from skin, from bone. What is natural, what is foreign, and where one begins and the other ends is no longer clear.
Courtesy of Arianwen Jones
Burling’s work considers what happens when the organic meets the mechanical—not in seamless fusion, but in a state of rupture and collapse. The world she conjures is one where bodies are perforated, exposed, and reshaped, their edges blurred by forces beyond their control. But there is no spectacle here. Her figures do not struggle, nor do they resist. Instead, they remain suspended, half-submerged in the moment of impact, existing within the slow violence of intrusion.
This is not simply about injury. It is about transformation. A world where flesh takes on the properties of metal, where the elements themselves seem infused with human-made structures. Wind turbines on the horizon become part of the sky, absorbed into weather systems, altering the way air moves, the way rain falls. Burling’s paintings speak to the quiet inevitability of these shifts, the way landscapes, bodies, and even time itself are no longer untouched by machinery.
Burling’s process is as much about erosion as it is about application. She presses pigment into the canvas with gloved fingers, rubbing and blurring until the image feels more like something glimpsed through mist or water. This haziness is not an aesthetic choice alone—it is a conceptual one. It speaks to instability, to the dissolution of boundaries, to the way bodies are always in a state of becoming or undoing.
She paints as though she is trying to capture the moment before something disappears entirely. The moment before flesh gives way to steel. The moment before the ocean swallows another structure whole. This slippage between form and environment is central to her work. In some paintings, the body itself seems indistinct, not simply intruded upon by external forces but dissolving into them.
Burling’s figures are punctured, hollowed, and reassembled. Openings appear where there should be solidity—ovals carved into torsos, slits in limbs. Sometimes the breaches are subtle, barely perceptible in the haze of pigment; other times, they are unmistakable voids, as though something has passed through, leaving only absence in its wake.
Beyond the body, Burling’s paintings extend their gaze outward, toward the larger systems in which we are all entangled. She envisions a world where the distinction between human and environment, between industry and nature, has long since blurred. In some works, machine parts hover like specters, half-formed, barely distinct from the sky around them. In others, sharp offcuts drift through space like pollen, as if the air itself has absorbed remnants of industry.
Burling describes her fascination with objects that do not belong—fragments of metal that feel as though they have always been there, saddles that carry the imprint of both rider and horse, propellers that seem as organic as they are artificial. These objects exist in a state of in-betweenness, bridging what we consider natural and what we have imposed upon the world.
Hers is a world without firm edges, where flesh and sky, machine and bone, horizon and body all blur together. A world where vulnerability is not just personal but planetary, where we are all caught in slow transformations that we may not fully perceive until they are complete.
In the end, Burling’s paintings do not ask whether these changes are good or bad. They do not ask whether the body can withstand them. They only ask us to look. To notice. To see, for a moment, the way things shift before they disappear.
Buzz, 2023, Oil on canvas, 140 x 110cm
Kate Burling (b. 1998, Reading) is a painter based in South London. Her work explores softness, memory, and materiality through layered, intuitive mark-making. A graduate of Camberwell College of Arts (2022), she is currently part of the Conditions Studio Programme (2024–25). Burling has held solo exhibitions at Ronchini Gallery, London, and Nosbaum Reding Gallery, Brussels, and has participated in residencies including Fondazione Sandro Moretti in Italy. Recent group exhibitions include Guts Gallery,Fiumano Clase, and Christie’s, London. Her work was presented at Milan Art Fair in 2023 with Nosbaum Reding Gallery. She continues to develop a painterly language rooted in emotional and spatial nuance.