Crowded rooms, fading flowers and ghostly portraits give way to landscapes where everything returns to the earth. Erin Chaplin paints the fragile comforts we build around ourselves and the uneasy business of leaving them behind.
Everard Read Cape Town, V&A Waterfront
Behind the Curtain | Erin Chaplin at Everard Read Cape Town
5–28 November 2026
Erin Chaplin’s Behind the Curtain at Everard Read Cape Town turns the familiar comforts of domestic life into something altogether more unsettling. Furniture crowds the rooms, flowers bloom on the edge of decay and small, spectral portraits seem caught between memory and disappearance. Continuing from her London exhibition Yellow Cocoon earlier this year, Chaplin works across four recurring subjects – interiors, still lifes, portraits and landscapes – in paintings thick with colour, movement and restless energy.
The interiors are packed with comfortable furniture, cherished ornaments and the accumulated possessions of a well-lived life. Yet these are rooms that seem to be closing in on themselves. Perspectives tilt, walls lose their edges and heavy brushstrokes threaten to spill beyond the canvas. The familiar becomes claustrophobic. Chaplin compares this struggle to a duckling breaking through its shell: the very thing that once offered protection must eventually be broken to allow growth.
From these crowded rooms emerge the flower paintings. Bouquets that might have stood on a table are given the full weight of Chaplin’s thick, almost sculptural paint. Petals swell with colour, stems twist and blossoms reach their fullest expression just as decay begins to set in. Chaplin calls this “a settled still moment before death”. The flowers are beautiful precisely because their moment is passing.
The small portraits are more troubling. Faces emerge from restless layers of paint like half-remembered figures, their expressions caught somewhere between recognition and uncertainty. They carry the unease of ageing, vulnerability and the changes we cannot prevent. Within these intimate paintings, the human face becomes another fragile thing, as vulnerable to time as the flowers beside it.
Then the kitchen door opens. Chaplin’s landscapes offer a sudden release from the crowded interiors, replacing their dense warmth with sweeping expanses of green. In Heaven for Martyrs, she imagines a burial ground where the body finally returns to the natural world. Branches stretch overhead, the earth waits below, and the familiar cycle of life and decay reaches its inevitable conclusion.
Chaplin’s paintings are physical things, their surfaces loaded with paint that seems to push and struggle against its own boundaries. Across the exhibition, the objects and places that offer reassurance become reminders of how little can be held in place. The rooms cannot contain us forever, the flowers cannot remain in bloom, and even the landscape that offers escape eventually becomes our resting place.
Behind the Curtain follows that passage from shelter to exposure, from the things we cling to towards the moment we must let them go.
Exhibition Opening | Thursday, 5 November 2026 | 18:00
Everard Read Cape Town, 3 Portswood Road, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town.
Exhibition closes | Saturday, 28 November 2026
Images courtesy of Everard Read and Erin Chaplin.
