Picnic Lightning

17 Goulston Street

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three,” Nabokov writes in Lolita (1955). To Georgia- May Travers Cook (b. 1995), “picnic, lightning” is a perfect economy of words, the title and conceptual anchor of her first London solo show. The violence of a life compressed into a clause, beauty and catastrophe made indistinguishable. Two words woven together into something that does not make logical sense and yet rings true. It was this aphoristic quality that the artist returned to while creating the works for Picnic Lightning, and its particular resonance with the novel-turned-film Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Food softens on a decorative platter under watchful eyes, curtains peeled back with suspicion are made appealing, all while peace unfurls slowly into danger. This subtle expectation carries through the works in Picnic Lightning. From the sinister delicacy of Bite to the infernal black swans of Still Day, Reddening Sky, aphorism accumulates; image pressed against the atmosphere, beauty pressed against its own concealment. What is repressed waits, poised and decorative, for the right moment. Destiny wanders peacefully through Picnic Lightning, while the sun has already begun to set.