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Heidi Yardley - The Witching Hour

In The Witching Hour, Heidi Yardley draws together longstanding concerns within her practice; memory, feminine identity, desire, ritual and the unconscious, with a deepening engagement with Tarot and esoteric traditions. Her paintings often begin with found images which are fragmented, reconfigured and transformed into psychologically charged scenes that seem suspended outside of ordinary time. Female figures emerge from shadow or retreat behind veils, hair and symbolic forms, inhabiting spaces poised between the domestic and the supernatural, the intimate and the archetypal.

The exhibition takes its title from the folkloric hour when the boundary between visible and invisible worlds is believed to become permeable. Here, this threshold becomes both subject and method; a space in which recollection, dream and divination overlap. Tarot imagery appears throughout the new series not as illustration, but as an open symbolic language through which questions of fate, transformation, intuition and female agency can be explored. Yardley's recent study and practice of Tarot - including readings conducted through her emerging practice, Midsummer Shadow Tarot, brings a lived dimension to the exhibition's mystical undertow.

A further presence within the project is Sylvia Plath, whose poems and life provide a conceptual constellation for the paintings and their titles. Julia Gordon-Bramer's The Occult Sylvia Plath has been an important point of reference, illuminating Plath's sustained engagement with Tarot, divination, mysticism and occult systems, and proposing new ways of reading the esoteric correspondences within her work. Rather than attempting to represent Plath biographically, Yardley approaches her poetry as a charged field of images; moons, mirrors, doubles, transformations, ritual objects and psychic states.

The exhibition's timing forms part of its conceptual structure. Opening on 17 March 2027, with a celebration on Saturday 20 March at the threshold of the autumn equinox (Mabon in Pagan traditions), The Witching Hour unfolds beneath a waxing moon approaching fullness on March 22^nd. These celestial and seasonal correspondences reinforce the exhibition's atmosphere of transition, ritual and feminine spiritual power. Across the series, Yardley invites viewers into an ambiguous nocturnal realm where the familiar becomes uncanny, images operate like omens, and painting itself assumes the character of an invocation.