We are delighted to present a new collection of paintings by Caroline Mordue, launching on 19 October.

Mordue has developed a highly distinctive language around the interior: quiet rooms, shop windows, tables, flowers and objects encountered almost incidentally. Her paintings are less concerned with describing these places than with capturing the sensation of having noticed them — a particular fall of light, an unexpected arrangement of colour, or the lingering atmosphere of a space.

Based in the Scottish Borders, Mordue studied Illustration at the University of Central Lancashire before continuing her development as a painter at Leith School of Art. Her work has been exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy and Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh, where her 2025 exhibition Haunts was followed by Through a Glass in 2026.

There is an intimacy to Caroline Mordue’s paintings that we find enormously compelling.

Her subjects are modest: a table, a vase of flowers, an empty chair, the interior of a restaurant or the glimpse of a room through glass. Yet Mordue understands that ordinary places accumulate their own emotional charge. A room does not need to contain a figure for us to feel that somebody has been there.

That sense of human presence without depiction is fundamental to her work.

Mordue paints loosely, often allowing the support itself to remain visible. Forms flatten, edges dissolve and detail is withheld. Her subdued palette — ochres, umbers, muted reds, creams and greys — gives the paintings a slightly displaced quality, as though what we are looking at sits somewhere between direct observation and memory.

Her acknowledged interest in Édouard Vuillard and Gwen John is understandable, particularly in the compression of space and sensitivity to the psychology of interiors, but the paintings increasingly feel entirely her own.

In the new works, light assumes an increasingly important role. Reflections interrupt surfaces; windows confuse the distinction between interior and exterior; objects emerge and disappear. Mordue has described being interested in the way light can interfere with a space almost as though it were an object itself. 

The resulting paintings reward slow looking. They do not announce themselves loudly. Instead, they recreate something extraordinarily familiar: the moment when an otherwise ordinary scene suddenly arrests us, and for reasons we cannot entirely explain, we remember it.