Haricot Gallery is thrilled to present Afterimage, a group show about painting as memory, bringing together Kristy Chan, Hattie Quigley, Grace Mattingly, Julia Moon, Vickie Li, Eleanor Johnson, Jesse Akele, Harry Thomson, Scarlett Budden, Lydia Makin, Lucy Robson and Ross Head.

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An afterimage is what stays on your eye after you look away from something bright, a trace of a moment that’s already passed. This exhibition isn’t interested in the moment itself so much as the memory of what’s left once it has slipped away, and how that memory gets interpreted differently depending on who’s holding onto it.

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In some of the paintings this is quite literal: figures blur and double on the canvas, or emerge and dissolve again, as if caught mid-movement, their edges never quite settling into a single shape. In others, it’s closer to a feeling that’s been returned to repeatedly: the same scene painted and repainted until what’s left on the canvas is less an accurate record than a sense of how it felt to be there, the lasting imprint of a place or a person. There’s nostalgia running through the show too, worked out through half-fiction and half-memory. For some artists it’s girlhood and childhood, for others it’s the people and places that shaped them, or the stories they grew up with, fairytales and myths handed down and reshaped with every retelling, which is its own quiet form of an afterimage.

Some begin with an image that already exists, a film still or an old photograph, and ask what changes when a picture of a moment gets painted rather than remembered. And then there are paintings that take the idea somewhere stranger altogether, ghostly, faintly unsettling images that seem to surface from somewhere just out of reach, closer to the logic of a half-remembered dream than to memory in any ordinary sense. Different routes, the same idea underneath: none of these paintings show you a moment as it happened. They show you what was left once it had already gone.