As the sun turns towards us and the days grow longer with a heady heat, so BSMT Gallery will mark the richness of the season with the opening of Summer Warp of Woven Tongues, a solo exhibition by Valeska Hykel.

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The longest day of the year stretches into something both ancient and other. Summer Warp of Woven Tongues threads abstract gestures as desire lines to a world that blooms with heightened, almost hallucinatory life. Traditional folk-wear and rural ritual surface like fragments of shared cultural memory tied to land, season and ceremony. Colour intensifies, forms break

down and the familiar slips into the psychedelic- a sensory landscape where memory and time loosen and perception bends. Hykel invites us into a solstice state: a moment of return suspended in light.

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Hykel’s monotypes exist in a space between painting and print, by working directly onto the mesh of the silkscreen she treats printmaking as an ever evolving ritual. Her images are not simply transferred but conjured. Marks degrade, colours bleed into one another, and the surface

carries the ghosts of its own making. What remains is something alive and half-remembered: the echo of a gesture, the afterimage of ceremony, the shimmer of a world caught between bloom and decay.

 

There is a tension in Hykel’s work between control and surrender. Her process begins with the hand, with the immediacy of painting, but passes through the mechanics of print where chance, resistance and loss become part of the image. The resulting works feel woven from contradiction: delicate yet feverish, folkloric yet strange, intimate yet expansive. They hold the

atmosphere of midsummer at its most unstable, when the natural world feels overlit, overripe, almost speaking.

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Summer Warp of Woven Tongues opens with a private view at 6pm on Thursday June 4th at BSMT Gallery, Dalston. The exhibition runs until Sunday June 21st, the summer solstice, closing on the longest day itself.

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Opening night drinks are generously sponsored by Jubel.

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For RSVP, catalogue requests or press enquiries please contact hello@bsmt.co.uk