Sutures brings together a new body of paintings by Sarah Gilfillan and sculptural works by Alana Burns, in a dialogue that explores rupture, repair, and the quiet resilience that emerges in the spaces between.
The exhibition takes its name from the Latin sutura—a sewn seam—and reflects on the visible traces of healing: the points where things once torn begin to be held together again. In this context, the suture becomes both a physical and emotional metaphor. It marks trauma but
also gestures toward the possibility of wholeness—not as a return to what once was, but as the emergence of something altered, tender, and continuous. Both Gilfillan and Burns approach this concept from deeply personal vantage points, having recently experienced loss and the layered grief that follows.
For Sarah Gilfillan, painting becomes a space for reflection and renewal — a conscious act of marking time in order to move through it, to find healing, and to begin a quiet rebirth. Departing from her earlier structured, premeditated approach, she now embraces an intuitive, emotionally driven process. Layers of methodology are peeled back, revealing a more spontaneous and vulnerable response. While her work has long balanced order and whimsy, in this series, order gently recedes. Through fluid gestures and layered pigment, a more liberated visual exprsion emerges — one that favours instinct over intention, emotion over control. Rather than seeking to conceal or resolve, these paintings hold space for uncertainty. They speak in a language shaped by rupture, tenderness, and quiet strength, yet still echo the harmony that has defined her practice. In this way, Gilfillan’s paintings offer more than catharsis. They reflect something deeper and more enduring: continuity.
Alana Burns extends the idea of the suture into sculptural form, creating objects that dwell in the in-between: between fragility and function, between memory and presence. Her works—delicate mobiles, abstracted shell forms, spoons, and wearable pieces—inhabit both domestic and ritual spaces. The central mobile, created in memory of her late friend Sofia, becomes a focal point of
personal love and reflection. These objects are not just commemorative; they are transformative. Each form speaks to the body and the everyday, offering tactile moments of grace and continuity.
Burns’s use of the shell is particularly resonant. In nature, sutures trace the spiral growth of mollusks, recording the passage of time and the architecture of protection. Her sculptures echo this
logic—fragile yet enduring, they reveal how transformation is embedded in the material memory of form.
Taken together, Gilfillan and Burns offer parallel meditations on the nature of healing. Their works do not suggest restoration to an original state. Rather, they ask what emerges after: after loss, after rupture, after the moment when something once whole becomes something new. The suture here is
not seamless. It is the visible stitching that makes fragility legible, that carries grief into form, and that insists on the quiet persistence of continuity.
