The Window Set

Charleston in Lewes

“The house … is an embodiment of dreams.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958 

“I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.” – Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

In Koak’s first UK solo institutional exhibition, ‘The Window Set’, softness becomes strength, and domesticity is transformed into a radical site for dreaming within and beyond the boundaries of selfhood. By giving agency to environments which have traditionally been considered passive (and feminine), for example the domestic and the natural, Koak weaves a thread from Vanessa Bell’s artistic practice to her own poetics of resistance. Like Daphne’s transformation into the laurel tree in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Koak imagines the self as a form deeply entwined with the elemental. In doing so, she posits the domestic space and the garden as political sites of nuanced identity and radical intimacy.

Through the recurring motif of the flower, Koak reimagines what is traditionally seen as decorative. Taking Vanessa Bell’s still lifes as her starting point, she treats the floral not as an object to be studied, but as a subject imbued with presence – a portrait of desire, longing, and interiority. Whilst the still life genre emphasises observation and objectivity, the portrait implies presence; a subject which resists containment. My Longing (2025), therefore, is a portrait of desire made visible. “All still lives feel like an extension of self to me,” Koak says, “and when I look at Bell’s, I see Bell: her endless portraits of flowers that feel filled with desire or sometimes loneliness, teeming over the edges, raw and alive”. What, she asks, does it mean to imagine the self as nature, wild and unbound? Like Charleston painted interiors and surrounding gardens, which blur the boundary between interior and exterior, art and life, ‘The Window Set’ challenges our relationship with the world that we exist within.

Each of the figures depicted in Koak’s works is engaged in solitary contemplation, their eyes closed or obscured. They are dreaming, or daydreaming; their domestic settings are sites for oneiric intimacy. The artist speaks of dreaming – of existing within oneself – as “a feminist gesture, a way of reclaiming agency over one’s interior world”. The Dreamer (2025) presents a woman in suspension – self-contained, serene, and held in a peaceful dream state. Her body is sculpted in concrete, a material often associated with foundations and stability, yet here taking on a surprising tenderness and warmth. This figure reimagines Quentin Bell’s sculptural series of levitating women, and Louise Bourgeois’s arched figures, as an embodiment of powerful vulnerability and radical dreaming. Like Koak’s portrait of Vanessa Bell, Blue Hour / Portrait of Vanessa (2025), The Dreamer evokes a moment of pause and solitude, amidst a world characterised by fragmentation. As Bachelard reminds us, dreams are not only journeys taken alone – they also communicate poetically, from soul to soul. In this sense, dreams become the sites of intimate connections, and public resistance.

If dreaming is a form of resistance in Koak’s work, the window becomes its visual counterpart – another liminal space where boundaries are forged and traversed. The exhibition’s title, ‘The Window Set’, acts as a metaphor for the mutable threshold where dreaming and reality, or containment and expansion, coalesce. In its allusion to the framing of the window (the ‘set’ refers to its drapery, as well as the window itself), this phrase also evokes a sense of theatricality, as embodied by the somewhat staged nature of domestic life. This is reflected in the installation of the work, which deconstructs the framework of a home. Instead, fragmented wooden walls appear as the trace of a building, in which – as Koak describes – “the presence of domesticity lingers but no longer feels fixed or whole – instead dissolving into the logic of dreams”.

‘The Window Set’ does not break down the threshold between the body and its environment, but rather makes visible the ambient poetic of their complex interdependence. In nature, the dream, and the domestic, Koak explores the ways in which identity extends beyond ourselves, and in doing so, envisions the revolutionary potential of self-knowledge and intimacy – transforming tenderness and vulnerability into outward resistance. Like Bell’s quietly charged practice before her, Koak’s work positions femininity and tenderness as the domain of radical connection. Here – to borrow the words of Ursula K. Le Guin – resistance cannot be bought, or stumbled upon. Instead, it is contained within us, yet ripples outwards – in landscapes, spirits, bodies, and homes.

Text by Ella Slater

Koak’s (b. 1981, USA) work portrays the complex duality of identity and human nature through a mastery of the line which extends across drawing, painting, and sculpture. Rendered with exquisite technique and effortless mark-making, her emotionally charged figures and landscapes are imbued with a compelling sense of agency and inner life.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Lake Margrethe, Perrotin, Paris (2024), Letter to Myself (when the world is on fire), Altman Siegel, San Francisco (2023), The Driver, Perrotin, Hong Kong (2022), Return to Feeling, Altman Siegel, San Francisco (2020) and Holding Breath, Union Pacific, London (2019). Selected group exhibitions include: Infinite Regresse: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas (2024), I’ve got a feeling, Musées d’Angers, Angers (2023), Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (2023), Heroic Bodies, Rudolph Tegners Museum and Statue Park, Dronningmølle, Denmark (2022) and New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2021), amongst others. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Union Pacific, London (Fall, 2025).