Traces Remain Alistair Gow, Birgit Klerch, Esther Schnerr

Traces Remain brings together the work of Alistair Gow, Birgit Klerch, and Esther Schnerr — three artists whose practices examine the subtle and lasting imprints of human presence. Though distinct in medium and approach, their works circle shared questions: How do we inhabit the world? What lingers once we have passed through?

Alistair Gow’s - winner of the BBA Art Award at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair London 2024, elusive compositions capture fragile moments of encounter and dissolution. His images, often dreamlike and refracted, evoke the uncertainty of perception and the passing nature of experience. These are not portraits, but presences — suspended in quiet tension, caught between intimacy and estrangement.

Birgit Klerch, shortlisted Artist for BBA Artist Prize 2025, turns inward to the emotional atmospheres of rooms and horizons. Her paintings emerge from lived environments, shaped by time and memory. Landscapes blur into abstraction, and gestures dissolve — revealing spaces haunted by longing, solitude, and the slow erosion of the idyllic.

Esther Schnerr, also shortlisted, reaches deep into natural history, exploring evolution, extinction, and the Anthropocene. Her detailed drawings, watercolours, and textile pieces trace the fine line between life’s abundance and its vulnerability. Fossils, remnants, and imagined ecologies appear as both evidence and warning — a quiet archaeology of the human age.

Together, their works form a shared ground — one that is layered, fragile, and marked by what has come before. In Traces Remain, we are invited to witness not only what is seen, but what is felt, remembered, and inevitably changed.