Floating Worlds

Gavin Maughfling

16th October 2025

The title of this exhibition is borrowed from the Japanese term, Ukiyo, used to describe the pleasure-seeking pursuits and locales of Edo Japan. These paintings depict scenes of past family life and intimate domestic experience. the images of floating refers to sensations of transience and the evasive mirage our recollection finds in reaching for what has irretrievably gone.

It perhaps also responds to a more specific and contemporary desire, in darkening times, to float free, and to escape into a reverie of a better epoch, or to retreat into a floating world of intimacy and lovemaking. Taking the concept further, the season could be seen to refer to impermanence and fluidity inherent in our experience of events while we are in them, so that figure and landscape, body and body are all dissolved in light and sound and touch, and in spoken words and hidden thoughts.

There is a sense of loss, an awareness amongst the protagonists that they are on the bring of the end of their familiar rowels, which it can be argued is found in the woodcuts of Hokusai and Hiroshige – and this sense of impending loss is seen in hindsight, when that loss has already occurred.