Holding Form brings together a new body of paintings by Hackney-based artist Ben Wakeling. Shaped by his work as an art facilitator within NHS mental health services, Wakeling’s practice reflects a close engagement with vulnerability, care and the fragile structures that hold human experience together. These concerns occasionally surface within the paintings themselves, but more often inform the atmosphere in which the work develops.

Working through an intuitive and process-led approach, Wakeling allows images to emerge gradually through layering, revision and erasure. Figures and fragments appear only briefly before dissolving back into the surrounding field of paint, leaving the works suspended between abstraction and figuration.

This sense of instability is central to the work. Built through hesitant marks, shifting spatial relationships and moments of interruption, the paintings resist immediate clarity. Instead, they invite a slower, more attentive form of looking, where meaning develops through rhythm, gesture and the accumulation of decisions made across the surface.

Rather than presenting resolved images, Wakeling’s paintings remain open and provisional. Within this process, painting becomes a way of holding fragile states together, allowing forms to persist only temporarily, unsettled and alive within the surface.