ARDEN + WHITE GALLERY is pleased to announce Soft Landing, an exhibition featuring new work by Australian painter Marisa Purcell and sculptor Ashley Lyon. Together, the artists explore the tension between material and perception, comfort and disquiet, the tangible and the imagined.
Soft Landing brings together two distinct yet deeply resonant practices—each grounded in quiet contemplation, sensitivity to form, and an awareness of how the physical world mirrors our inner lives. Through their respective languages of paint and clay, Purcell and Lyon offer a meditation on the human need for grounding, and on the fragile, shifting spaces we construct to find balance amid uncertainty.
Across Marisa Purcell’s expansive linen surfaces, translucent veils of acrylic wash build slowly, layer upon layer, until depth and atmosphere begin to emerge. Her process is one of both precision and surrender: a dialogue between intention and chance that invites something unseen to reveal itself. Color becomes not merely pigment but an element; air, emotion, vibration, creating spaces that hover between material and immaterial. Each painting resists containment, shifting with light and proximity, dissolving into a state that feels both intimate and infinite. Rooted in a deep engagement with abstraction, Purcell’s practice seeks to uncover connections beyond everyday perception, using the surface as a site of revelation.
In contrast, Ashley Lyon’s sculpted clay pillows invite the eye with a promise of softness only to confront the hand, and the mind, with solidity and stillness. Meticulously hand-built, her sculptures balance technical mastery with emotional charge. They are paradoxes made tangible: weight masquerading as rest, tension disguised as tenderness. Central to Lyon’s practice is the concept of matrescence—the transformation of becoming a mother—and her work embodies the layered realities of care, exhaustion, and intimacy that accompany that evolution. Through this lens, her ceramic forms reflect the complexities of motherhood, where comfort and strain coexist in constant flux.
In Soft Landing, the interplay between Purcell’s ethereal canvases and Lyon’s grounded sculptures becomes a conversation about perception and presence, surrender and solidity. Both artists navigate the boundaries between what can be held and what must be felt, between the desire for rest and the inevitability of change.
Together, their works form a tender counterpoint: Purcell’s paintings invite the viewer into vast, floating expanses of color and light, while Lyon’s sculptures return us to the weight of the body and the quiet persistence of form. Within this dialogue lies a shared stillness, a recognition that even in moments of disquiet, there is the possibility of gentle landing, of finding softness not in the absence of struggle, but within it.
© Text and Photo Courtesy of ARDEN + WHITE GALLERY
