EVAPORATING LANGUAGE AND WHAT IS LEFT BEHIND
Charlie Gates
1–18 october 2026

Employing water as a lens to explore losses in translation, Charlie Gates presents a body of work depicting processes of decontextualisation and the erosion of meaning. Water embodies a series of dualities – clarity and turbidity; evaporation and condensation; dissolution and deposition – reflecting the intrinsic nature of the subject and the scene.

Through printmaking, Gates traces the gradual decontextualisation of images, using matrices as a space between the original subject and its translation. Images are obscured, fragmented, and abstracted through processes involving melting tusche ice blocks, diluted and evaporated liquids, and water interacting with wet paper. These processes allow images to shift progressively away from their original context, eventually dissolving into non-objective arrangements of colour and form.

The works question how much of an original idea remains as it passes through successive acts of translation. In this sense, water becomes both metaphor and method: a material embodiment of the gaps, distortions, and transformations that occur when meaning moves between contexts. The resulting works occupy a space between representation and abstraction, inviting reflection on what is lost, altered, or left behind.