Mira Venn — Ternform Gallery

Fictional artist profile from Ternform Gallery. This document is an original reading sheet, not an authenticated professional CV or record of external awards and exhibitions.

Practice: Flowing abstract painting; edges, drift and changes of scale.

Mira Venn makes paintings in which a shape seems to acquire a direction and then change its mind. Pale folds open into darker pockets; a narrow line sometimes holds a broad area of colour in place. Her practice begins with that unstable moment between recognising a thing and simply following a mark. The works reward a slow second look, especially where a seemingly continuous form turns out to have been interrupted by a different layer.

Venn starts on small paper sheets, working with a limited set of tones so that colour cannot solve every compositional problem for her. She turns a sheet between passes and leaves one edge unfinished until the rest of the image has settled. A promising small study is not enlarged square by square. Instead, she carries its main tension into a larger painting and lets the increased reach of an arm change the mark. Several passages may be scraped back. The resulting surface keeps evidence of decisions that a perfectly smooth reproduction can make difficult to see.

In Drift Instructions, this way of working becomes a question about orientation. The exhibition follows forms that resemble cloud, cloth or moving water without asking the viewer to settle on any one description. Venn's interest is in the process of finding a route through an image. A pale gap can act like a doorway for one viewer and a pause for another; both readings begin with the same painted boundary.

Away from a finished canvas, Venn keeps a notebook of edges rather than a catalogue of subjects. A shadow beside a handrail, the join of two sheets and a crease in folded paper can each prompt a small study. She describes an unfinished passage by its behaviour: it presses, slows, opens or loses weight. These verbs help her discuss a painting without making its uncertainty sound like a defect. For a visitor, the most useful starting point is equally modest: choose one edge, follow it carefully, and notice the first place where the image asks you to change direction.

Programme entries:

Drift Instructions | 2026-03-07 to 2026-04-26

Edition date: 2026-09-08

No external qualifications, awards or press claims are asserted. Illustrative media sources are recorded separately in the gallery edition.