Tramaine de Senna “Fire and Eyes”
Fred & Ferry Gallery 10 January – 7 February 2026
Fire and Eyes marks Tramaine de Senna’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, bringing together new ceramic works and drawings that extend the artist’s long-standing inquiry into how culture represents itself—through taste, judgment, and the continual negotiation between abstraction and figuration.
Across sculpture and drawing, de Senna returns to what she has often described as the contest between the subject and its plastic forms: the point at which an image resists its own realization, and where material, gravity, and decision-making shape how meaning appears. Rather than illustrating ideas, the works allow form to arrive through pressure—through weight, balance, surface, and duration—so that judgment is produced experientially rather than prescribed.
The exhibition centers on hand-built ceramic works and drawings executed in colorfast pencil on primed canvas. Among them is a cantilevered ceramic sculpture whose structure recalls both architectural modernism and bodily vulnerability: a form suspended against gravity, built without molds, asserting technical mastery while retaining visible risk. Other ceramic works take the form of small studies—recurrent motifs of legs, heels, hands, drapery, and planar surfaces—that register as fragments in motion. Their glazed surfaces hold intentional tension: jade-toned finishes allow the red Saint-Aubin clay to surface beneath, producing a perceptual shift from distance to proximity.
Drawing operates as both parallel practice and site of condensation. Restrained in palette and scale, the drawings hover between recognition and abstraction, tracking what might be called the migration of forms—how images move across bodies, materials, and cultural registers. Drapery, footwear, and partial figures emerge through subtle modulation of pressure and tone. From afar, the images remain provisional; up close, they reward sustained attention, making visible the construction of appearances as something contingent, layered, and unresolved.
Installed across two gallery spaces, Fire and Eyes unfolds through repetition and interruption. Small-scale ceramic works draw the viewer inward; drawings insist on proximity; larger sculptural forms anchor the exhibition through physical tension. Together, the works propose a mode of looking grounded in material presence and lived duration—one that resists immediacy, privileges encounter, and holds judgment in suspension. At a moment when images circulate frictionlessly and meaning is often reduced to instant appraisal, Fire and Eyes insists on another rhythm: one in which form must be met, tested, and slowly understood.
