Where the Word Becomes Color and Voice Becomes Touch: Sue Tompkins and “Love Ahead”
The Modern Institute, Aird’s Lane · Until 16 May 2026
Those who have followed Sue Tompkins’ practice for years know that language has always been the absolute root of her art. How words are constructed, and how voice and speech are bent as tools of personal expression, constitute her endless field of research. However, upon stepping into The Modern Institute’s Aird’s Lane space and confronting the “Love Ahead” exhibition, one is met not with the legible texts we are accustomed to, but with a much more abstract and silent space where the word slowly melts into a body, a texture.
The Memory of the Center: Voices in Glass Vitrines
A series of glass vitrines placed at the heart of the space serves as the exhibition’s conceptual anchor. Within these vitrines, Tompkins’ typewritten texts, small paintings, and performance notes are presented together. You witness how fragments of conversation and ordinary expressions plucked from daily life are poetically rearranged by the artist—essentially, how she plays with words. Seeing the texts from her legendary 2003 performance Country Grammar—one of the artist’s first live iterations within a gallery context—proves how her incessant stream of consciousness, observations, and scribbles have transformed into a massive archive.
Letters Melting on Canvas: A Tactile Resistance
When you look up from the vitrines toward the walls, a surprising transformation begins. The legible words and phrases frequently encountered in Tompkins’ recent work give way to a much more ambiguous abstraction in this new series. We are now under the dominance of intermediate tones, formless shapes, and gold-colored bands shimmering across the canvas.
Words practically melt and vanish within thick layers of impasto paint, thickened with PVA glue and various additives. There are no brushes; the works are shaped directly by the artist’s hands, through physical contact. There are constant diagonal slashes, leaning lines, and mesmerizing dots and circles reminiscent of flowers or cosmic celestial bodies. Tompkins mixes the paint directly on the canvas rather than on a palette, creating dynamic, instantaneous tonal transitions. The surface of the canvas becomes a continuous field of arrangement; each painting carries the traces of overlapping layers and erasures like a bodily memory.
The Silent Extension of Performance
The invisible echo of the Love Ahead performance, executed by the artist herself on the opening day and giving the exhibition its name, still hangs within the gallery. Looking at those intense, intuitive, and bodily brushstrokes on the walls, you realize that these paintings are, in fact, silent extensions of Tompkins’ live performances. Where words are no longer enough, the emotional possibilities they harbor continue to speak through paint, touch, and rhythm.
If you wish to experience how a text ceases to be something read and transforms into a felt texture, do not miss this poetic and tactile exhibition. As we approach the middle of May, these are your final days to witness this formless dance of words.
