Nicola Farquhar’s paintings metabolise the world, processing everything around us into a vibrant composition. Her teeming, pulpy surfaces can look like animals, fruit, organs, plants and other planets. In Birds, a striped form pours downward and is reabsorbed into the background. There is a sense of reproductive possibility within the work, as each part seems to synthesise with another and feed back into the whole; wiggling lines and loose shapes suggest something cellular might be taking place. Farquhar’s interest in science fiction offers new ways of thinking about how we relate to each other and to different species – how can we think carefully and urgently about being on Earth?

(Jane Wallace, 2023)