31 October 2024 - 4 January 2025

Private View: 30 October (Wednesday), 6-8pm

Flowers Gallery Hong Kong is pleased to present Transhumance, the debut solo exhibition in Hong Kong by renowned British artist Ishbel Myerscough.

Known for her highly detailed and meticulously observed portraits, Myerscough delves into the transient nature of life through a series of paintings and drawings created between 2018 and 2024. These works explore the vibrancy of youth, the subtleties of middle age, and life’s impermanence.

In Ishbel, 2024, a self portrait, Myerscough poignantly explores the sense of invisibility often felt by women of her age. The artist wears a bold and colourful dress, drawing parallels with iconic, flamboyant older women like Iris Apfel and Zandra Rhodes, whose distinctive styles transcend age, making them timeless, confident symbols of individuality. This candid self-portrait emphasises the artist’s unkempt hair and bare skin, contrasted with her vibrant, patterned dress, embellished with symbols of eyes, horses, snakes and other motifs inspired by richly symbolic Elizabethan portraiture. This choice of attire is intentional; Myerscough notes the paradox of becoming more invisible when she wears the dress.

In Bella on Sofa II, 2018, Bella, 2023, and Black Slip, 2024, Myerscough captures three stages of her daughter Bella’s life, from ages 10 to 16, as she lounges introspectively. These works preserve not just isolated moments but a period of time, reflecting on the ongoing process of parenting - mourning who children were while marvelling at who they are becoming. As she studies Bella, Myerscough subtly explores her own relationship with her mother, contemplating how she might have been seen through her mother’s eyes.

Myerscough’s portrait of her son, Black Sofa, 2024, captures the transformation she witnessed when he returned from university significantly taller than he was when he departed. By stretching and elongating his form to fill the sofa, she emphasises the expansive presence of youth.

In Broken Bowl, 2023, Myerscough depicts a cherished bowl gifted by her mother, which slipped from her husband’s fingers and shattered six years after her mother’s passing. The event triggered an overwhelming wave of grief, illustrating how inanimate objects are imbued with deep emotional significance.

Two purposefully unfinished drawings - one of wild daisies Daisies, 2024, flourishing outside and another of a dead houseplant House Plant, 2024, under Myerscough’s care, still beautiful in its decay - further underscore Myerscough’s meditation on the passage of time, and impermanence.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ishbel Myerscough (b. 1968) is recognised for her highly detailed and meticulously observed portrayal of her subject matter, which over the past three decades has primarily included herself, her close friend and fellow artist Chantal Joffe, and their families. Myerscough combines a focused study of youth and coming-of-age with adult experiences of parenthood, desire and bereavement, evoking the complex cycle of human experience.

Myerscough studied at Glasgow and the Slade Schools of Art, and works in London. In 1995 she won the National Portrait Gallery’s annual BP Portrait Award competition and as a result was commissioned to paint Helen Mirren’s portrait for the collection and subsequently Sir Willard White. Her portrait Two Girls (1991), was displayed in the exhibition Self at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK in 2015 and at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until November 2016. Her work was presented in a joint display Friendship Portraits: Chantal Joffe and Ishbel Myerscough at the National Portrait Gallery in 2015, capturing their very particular artistic collaboration; and was included in the exhibitions Only Connect, Royal Academy of Arts, Keeper’s House, London, 2017; and Relating Narratives – A Common World of Women, The Horse Hospital, London, 2018. Ishbel Myerscough's All (2016) is included in Hayward Gallery's touring exhibition, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood. The exhibition was shown at Arnolfini Arts in Spring 2024 and is currently at the Midlands Arts Centre until 29 September. It will then travel to the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield from 24 October 2024 to 21 January 2025, and finally to Dundee Contemporary Arts in Spring 2025.

Image Credits:

© Ishbel Myerscough, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

For more information and images please contact:
Echo Guo: echo@flowersgallery.com or Leighanne Murray: leighanne@atelierpublicrelations.com

Opening Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 6 pm