Meditations on Red explores colour as both a sensory experience and an embodied encounter—examining the ways in which pigment, perception and memory converge to create meaning. The exhibition emerges from an intimate relationship with the colour red: a colour of intensity, vitality and transformation, but also one deeply connected to the fragility and impermanence of life. Through sustained engagement with red in its many forms, Northwood considers colour not simply as a visual phenomenon, but as a force capable of evoking physical, emotional and ancestral responses.

The works investigate the historical and symbolic resonance of red across human cultures, tracing its associations with vitality, ceremony, blood, birth, death and renewal. Drawing upon ancient systems of colour symbolism, including the chakra traditions recorded within early Sanskrit texts, the exhibition considers red as a threshold colour—one connected to embodiment, energy and the cyclical movement between states of becoming and dissolution.

At the centre of Meditations on Red is an exploration of ritual and transformation, particularly the profound transitions associated with womanhood. The works reflect upon the continuity of feminine experience across generations, acknowledging the invisible lineage of those who came before and those who will follow. Through this lens, rites of passage become not only moments of individual transformation, but points of connection within a much larger continuum of human experience.

The physical processes of mark making, layering and working directly with red pigments become acts of contemplation and connection. The materiality of the colour itself becomes a site of encounter, carrying associations of the body, the earth and the cycles that govern all living systems. Informed by the artist’s experience of witnessing life and death within the harsh and fragile landscape of the desert, the works hold a tension between beauty and vulnerability, endurance and decay.

Meditations on Red considers existence as a continual process of transformation, where beginnings and endings are not separate but interconnected. Through colour, gesture and material, the exhibition reflects on the shared rhythms of life—the ceremonies we inherit, the bodies we inhabit and the cycles of change that connect us across time.