Annika Tucksmith: It’s Here

It’s Here centers on the charged stillness that emerges as twilight deepens into dusk. Tucksmith’s new paintings illuminate this fleeting threshold, balancing the warmth of familiar landscapes with the quiet tension of what lies ahead.

The works evoke the sensibility of a coming-of-age memory, an atmosphere where innocence and experience coexist within a dense, fog-laden terrain. Lush, expressive brushstrokes shape verdant countryside scenes, while flashes of lava-toned underpainting break through the surface. Both materially and visually, Tucksmith captures a state of transition, one that feels expansive, uncertain, and alive. In these dreamlike spaces, calves nurse under their mothers’ watch, embers simmer with the threat of ignition, deer graze against the approach of nocturnal predators, unruly bouquets bloom toward obstruction, and mysterious rituals emerge and unfold.

In Tucksmith’s world, the shift into night is unaccompanied, offering a space for self-discovery that arises without oversight. What may first register as solitude gradually reveals itself as a landscape with its own responsive presence—an active participant rather than a passive backdrop. The result is a symbiotic relationship in which creatures shape the land even as the land shapes them.

It’s Here functions as a lullaby to the bright day, welcoming the rise of the moon. As the sun lowers, a crepuscular passage opens—a brief, hushed pocket of peace. And yet, beneath this calm, something unknown is not merely approaching; it has already arrived.