PRESS RELEASE
ERIN CHAPLIN | BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Nov 5 – Nov 28, 2026
ERIN CHAPLIN
BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Erin Chaplin’s latest solo exhibition is an extension of her show earlier this year at Everard Read in London, ‘Yellow Cocoon’. With an emphasis on nature morte, in ‘Behind the Curtain’ Chaplin continues to weave the four threads of her practice together into a collection as dense as her paint-laden canvases. Portraits, bouquets, interiors and landscapes – each is a note in a nursery rhyme, or a pebble held tight in a pocket; a ritual meant to protect but as tenuous as an egg shell.
In the nostalgic interiors, with their comfortable furniture and accumulation of beloved tchotchkes, there is a feeling of the unheimlich in their very familiarity. The frantic brushstrokes and cramped busyness don’t always fit within the frame. Within these complex narrative spaces the angles are dizzying, the edges dissolving. ‘Like a duckling battling to escape its egg and hatch’, Chaplin shows us how something that protects us can also keep us confined, and small. The discomfort of growth is a necessary anguish. A new song must be sung.
Extracted from the interiors (see that vase on the table there?), the flower bouquets are a glorious plea to pay attention. With an almost visceral quality to their vegetation, they are odes to beauty and the inevitable decay of time. ‘A settled still moment before death’, they are lush, they are lovely –– but some of them are already on their way out. This is a moment to pause, Chaplin asks of us. To be present. To take a deep (perhaps ragged) breath and indulge in radical acceptance.
The tiny portraits are the restless ghosts of our unease. Something other-worldly is lurking in these rooms, in the mirror, ‘something between past and present, a secret in the look of doing and being well’. In sharing these faces, Chaplin confronts us with our own mortality. In this site of shared vulnerability, we must acknowledge that ‘wanting more, needing more, means adapting and taking flight. Sacrificing being safe to grow bigger and braver’.
The kitchen door opens and we escape from containment into the wild outside. Large and green, where the other works are dense and warm, the landscapes are ‘an ending for the spirits trapped in the home’. Chaplin created ‘Heaven for Martyrs’ as a burial ground; everything returns, after all, to the earth. ‘If I turn left or right,’ she comments, ‘the eventual outcome is the same. For everyone.’ Our shifting and stretching metamorphosis may be painful, but it is inevitable, and the pain we may feel is lessened if we embrace it. And so, finally, we have pushed beyond domesticity into sublime Nature – given a place to rest in peace, in transience, as the branches wave above us and we become food for worms.
EVERARD READ CAPE TOWN - 3 Portswood Road, V&A Waterfront
