Private View: Thursday, 17th of September 2026, 6-8pm
West Palm Beach (Florida, USA)
A woman balances one-footed on the top of a pearlescent egg. Her black hair ripples down behind her, a silken stairway, and out in undulating strands that become part of the wallpaper of painted leaves, branches for black birds. Weaving together personal memories with folklore and women’s histories, Welsh artist Darcy Whent creates compositions that sit in an uneasy space between seduction and menace, pleasure and pain. Soft Bodies, Hard Frames, her first solo exhibition in the US at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach, draws us into a fantastical world of hybrid spaces and characters that question how inherited narratives shape not only our understanding of self but our broader belief systems.
Whent grew up in rural Wales and spent her childhood longing for life in the city. Painting became both her escape and a way of processing complex psychological experiences without needing to land upon or offer up a resolution. As such, her compositions open up more questions than they answer, often inviting us to entertain multiple and seemingly contradictory perspectives. She is interested in how stories are constructed and interpreted, and in what allows one narrative to acquire authority while others are dismissed.
This latest body of work, in particular, looks at the relationship between fairy tales and religious texts, the former being associated with whimsy and fantasy, while the other may be treated as scripture or absolute truth. The scenes she paints occupy an uncomfortable threshold between the two, where belief is unstable and the distinction between myth, memory and truth becomes difficult to maintain. In these spaces the natural world appears as both a source of entrapment and of uncanny power. Creeping vines emerge from the backdrop to wrap over and around her figures’ limbs, while paintings such as Light as a feather draw on associations with ritual and play. Here, eggs positioned across the floor act as symbols of fertility, rebirth and fragility, while black birds appear both as familiars and omens.
In Nettle, a painting titled to allude both to the plant’s sharp sting and healing properties, we encounter a woman lying with her head across another woman’s lap. At a first glance, it appears to be a tender scene, but the more we look the more strange it becomes. The sitting figure’s legs are open, so that the head of the lying woman is not supported, her long blonde hair filling the space between her knees, while her folded hands suggest restraint rather than caress. And once again, the vines creep inwards, binding them both in a murky, indistinguishable space. This in-between state is also one of transition for Whent’s figures who appear alternately innocent and authoritative, naive and knowing, caught between girlhood and womanhood. ‘I am interested in how qualities tolerated or encouraged in girls, imagination, silliness, dependence, vulnerability, can later be used to diminish women or deny them credibility,’ she explains.
Across Whent’s paintings, hair captures this bind. Depicted as long, luscious and perfectly waved, it becomes both familiar and strange, symbolic of comfort and desire as well as oppression and restraint. In Stay, Stay, Stay, it grows out from the figure’s head, spilling across her back and limbs, transforming her into a glossy-coated ginger dog with an upright curled tail. Elsewhere, in the drawing Hair of the dog, Part two, a strand of hair has been used as thread to stitch a quaint criss-crossed pattern across a dog’s back. In Let your hair down, let down your hair, a play on words that alludes both to the Rapunzel fairytale and the English idiom meaning to relax or enjoy oneself, a cascade of locks becomes a kind of stairway to heaven, traversed by figures, dressed in matching pale pink pleated skirts and furry jackets. The scene hovers between the imaginative world of children’s games and something altogether more unsettling. The figure on all fours, serving as a stool for her twin, gazes out at us with an expression of trepidation. What’s unclear is whether they are climbing into or away from safety. ‘For me,’ says Whent, ‘this is where the psychological tension of the work sits. The source of danger and the possibility of escape are often the same.’
Whent asks us to remain in this space of unknowing. In doing so, she presents uncertainty not as a barrier, but as a way of testing the stories we inherit. By holding myth, memory and scripture in uneasy proximity, her paintings expose the hard frames through which authority is constructed - and remind us that inherited stories only retain their power so long as they go unquestioned.
