For her second solo exhibition at Livie Gallery, Esther Mathis (b. 1985) has recreated from memory windows of particular significance to her. Windows that she has spent many hours looking out through, and where she has watched the light come dancing in. These works evoke the remembered atmosphere of those window-lit spaces. Memory is often conceived of as a kind of glass through which we watch refractions of our previous selves as they fade into the distant past. And yet, it is hard to recall memories that specifically relate to light, and those we have are almost always related to windows we have known.

The form of most windows is dictated by their function: architecture and technology in dialogue with light. Before glass, when windows were fashioned out of paper or animal skins, or even marble, they have always been about how to invite light into an enclosed space. These days we spend more time inside our built-structures looking out than outside looking in. We wear our buildings like psychic skins, windows become our eyes on the world, but they also provide shelter, both physical and mental, from that world. A space to contemplate, to hear one’s thoughts thinking themselves. In English ‘window’ comes from the Old English eagduru meaning ‘eye-door’. Our windows are eyes, our eye-doors are windows.

For her second solo exhibition at Livie Gallery, Esther Mathis (b. 1985) has recreated from memory windows of particular significance to her. Windows that she has spent many hours looking out through, and where she has watched the light come dancing in. These works evoke the remembered atmosphere of those window-lit spaces. Memory is often conceived of as a kind of glass through which we watch refractions of our previous selves as they fade into the distant past. And yet, it is hard to recall memories that specifically relate to light, and those we have are almost always related to windows we have known.

The form of most windows is dictated by their function: architecture and technology in dialogue with light. Before glass, when windows were fashioned out of paper or animal skins, or even marble, they have always been about how to invite light into an enclosed space. These days we spend more time inside our built-structures looking out than outside looking in. We wear our buildings like psychic skins, windows become our eyes on the world, but they also provide shelter, both physical and mental, from that world. A space to contemplate, to hear one’s thoughts thinking themselves. In English ‘window’ comes from the Old English eagduru meaning ‘eye-door’. Our windows are eyes, our eye-doors are windows.