Sacred Life marks a significant transition within Northwood's practice, extending her material enquiry from sculpture into painting. The works emerge through direct bodily engagement, where gesture becomes an index of attention, presence and embodied perception. Dispensing with conventional tools, ochre and pigment are applied by hand, allowing the body to function simultaneously as instrument, surface and measure. In doing so, painting becomes less an act of representation than a record of encounter—an accumulation of touch, movement and duration.

This tactile mode of making reflects an ongoing enquiry into the relationship between consciousness, materiality and the lived body. Rather than imposing form upon the surface, Northwood's process privileges responsiveness, allowing marks to emerge through sustained attention and reciprocal exchange with the material. The paintings unfold through intuition rather than prescription, where the act of making becomes inseparable from the act of perceiving. Gesture is understood not as expression alone, but as a means of attuning to subtle states of awareness that exist beyond language.

Throughout the exhibition, the body is approached not as an isolated subject but as one element within a broader ecology of relations. The works propose a world in which distinctions between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, become increasingly permeable. Matter is encountered as active and relational, carrying its own temporalities, histories and capacities to shape experience. In this way, the paintings invite a reconsideration of how consciousness might extend beyond the individual, emerging instead through continual exchanges between body, material and environment.

The title, Sacred Life, locates the sacred not in transcendence, but within the ordinary conditions of embodied existence. It suggests that meaning arises through attention—that the simple act of noticing can reveal the vitality that permeates the material world. Rather than positioning the land as subject or setting, the exhibition approaches it as a living presence with which we are continually in relation. The works quietly propose an ethics of reciprocity, care and humility, asking what becomes possible when we understand ourselves not as separate from the world, but as participants within its ongoing processes of becoming.

falling from grace, 2019 60 x 60cm
found pigment, ochre, charcoal on board

looking for water, 2019 60 x 60cm
found pigment, ochre, gouache on board

dig a hole, burn the body, 2019 60 x 60cm
found pigment, ochre, charcoal, ash, gouache on board

feel III, 2019 22 x 22cm
glazed stoneware ceramic from locally dug clay

feel, 2019 22 x 22cm
glazed stoneware ceramic from locally dug clay

we forgot to listen, 2019 22 x 22cm glazed stoneware ceramic from locally dug clay

souls rising, 2019 60 x 60cm
found pigment, charcoal, ochre, acrylic on board

don’t think, feel, 2019 60 x 60cm
found pigment, charcoal, ochre, ceramic on board

shasti III, 2019 20 x 180cm
underglaze stoneware ceramic from locally dug clay with kintsugi