LIZZY MARSHALL
Swoln River
May 16-June 7, 2026

 Swoln River is a solo exhibition of new paintings by Lizzy Marshall. Woven together with her lived experience, this body of work draws inspiration from The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Set within a landscape divided by a river (a boundary between the land of the senses and land of the spirit), the tale unfolds through human, animal, and ethereal figures engaging Goethe’s enduring themes of metamorphosis, polarity, and fulfillment. 

The green snake, who becomes a bridge between these realms, offers a metaphor for painting itself in Marshall’s practice: through the layering of water, minerals, and oil, material form becomes a passage toward philosophical and spiritual insight.

“My recent paintings treat landscape as a language of belonging, loss, and transformation,” Lizzy Marshall writes. “They are fields where memory and imagination converge into visual storytelling. Rather than depicting a place, the images suggest its afterlife, how environments persist in the psyche through impression and recollection.” 

Central to Marshall’s practice is erasure and revision. These processes are treated not as secondary to mark-making but as essential, structural forces. The resulting surfaces register time, thought, and shifting perception, unfolding slowly through layered acts of construction and removal.

Each work begins on an unstretched canvas laid on the studio floor. Marshall applies thin acrylic washes to establish an initial atmospheric structure before moving between floor and wall, navigating horizontal and vertical orientations as the work develops. Oil paint and graphite are subsequently built up in layered passages, repeatedly rubbed back, altered, and reasserted. This cyclical process produces surfaces that function as visual records of thought and duration. A recurring presence of green can be seen throughout the exhibition, evoking thoughts of regeneration, expansion, and continuous becoming.

Through this synthesis of process, materiality, and literary reference, Marshall’s paintings articulate landscape not as representation, but as a dynamic field of transformation in which perception, memory, and form remain in constant negotiation.

This exhibition is curated by Finnish artist Sampsa Pirtola and presented in collaboration with Rudolf Steiner Library (www.rudolfsteinerlibrary.org). This exhibition is open Thur–Sun, 1–5pm.