A roman candle is a paradox. It is a celebration of beauty with a fuse. It is an invitation and a threat. It is both a blinding festival and a funeral. Its name carries a history of fire and cruelty. It echoes pain disguised as pleasure. 

In ancient Rome, under Emperor Nero’s rule, early Christians were set ablaze to light his gardens after the Great Fire of 64 AD. Bodies turned into torches. Punishment turned into a spectacle. Light used as terror. Light used as control. Over time, the act of burning became a call to arms, a form of entertainment in which play turns into perversion. 

Sarah Tompkins lives in a similar tension that ignites and smoulders a squall of emotions, ranging from tender and soft to cataclysmic and hard. Continuing from her previous solo exhibition, Blue Shift, she exists between anarchic play and a sensual inquiry into the uncertainty of the broader forces that shape existence, such as space, time, and the delicate balance between chaos and order. 

In Roman Candle, colour acts as a form of combustion. Hard-edge gestures twist, burst, reveal, and recoil. Each brushstroke feels volatile. It is as if these works operate as landscapes of a fourth dimension of space and time communicated as a field of sparks. To arrive at this junction, Tompkins shows us how her eye traced over, around, and through unknowable anti-objects, and towards an abstracted lit fuse in the twilit recesses of a rare space. In that moment, in these paintings, we see how her hand holds not a brush to canvas, but a match to a fuse. These paintings are a site of consequence that offers the ground for ecstasy and danger in a firework of movement. 

These paintings speak of the pressure and pleasure of looking. If you take the blinding risk to allow the work to consume you and follow Tompkins, your hand will also light a fuse, and as you watch it burn, you will find yourself at the edge of joy and nostalgia. Or, something echoing the concept of individual memory or body that preceded our understanding. 

Roman Candle is an exploration of Tompkins’ acceptance of the allure of danger. She is chasing moments that burn brightly and briefly. Tompkins is prophetically capturing beauty that cannot last as just one thing because it is forever in motion and forever becoming.