Soft Tissue

Refusés is pleased to present a new body of work by London-based artist Elspeth Vince (b. 1993) at Minor Attractions art fair and in Soft Tissue, her first solo exhibition with the gallery, at Refusés' permanent exhibition space at Queensrollahouse in Park Royal, London.

Soft Tissue begins with a recurring nightmare and asks a simple question: is memory a complete record of what happens to us, or does experience leave traces that memory cannot fully hold? The exhibition considers bodily memory and dreams, and the way a feeling can register before it is understood, or persist after its source has been forgotten. For Vince, painting is a way of giving physical form to what cannot be fully recovered or located.

The exhibition's argument draws on hauntology, a term introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993) to describe a haunting that runs in two directions: not only by what has already happened, but by what has not yet happened, or may never happen at all. Vince's paintings work from the premise that anticipation and dread can feel as real, and leave as much of a trace, as an event that has actually taken place. The exhibition locates this feeling in the domestic interior, a bed, a room, a piece of fabric, spaces normally associated with safety, made strange by a presence that cannot be dated or identified.

Across the exhibition, the gallery is treated as an extension of the world the paintings themselves live in. Lighting is carefully positioned and manipulated, passing through a window pane sculpture in the middle of the space to cast a shadow across the floor, the shadow itself making more of a mark than the window. A curtain made in collaboration with DALA denim is painted over by Vince, while an ambient soundtrack runs throughout the room, contributing to its atmosphere. Rather than viewing the paintings from a fixed distance, visitors move through an ambient, psychologically charged environment that reflects the works themselves. The exhibition becomes an experience of stepping inside one of Vince's paintings, rather than looking at it from the outside.

Soft Tissue is the first long term exhibition in Refusés' permanent space. Since its founding in 2024, Refusés has operated as a touring gallery without a fixed address, staging exhibitions in private homes, hotels and artist-led spaces across London, New York and Europe. Queensrollahouse gives the gallery a base for a different rhythm of programming: fewer, longer-running exhibitions, developed through research and supported by a public programme of talks, screenings and partnerships, in contrast to the faster turnover of the touring model. Refusés' site-specific and travelling programme continues internationally alongside it.