Callum Youde: Soft Structures.

There’s a quiet tension that exists in the spaces we move through every day – between routine and disruption, control and instinct, memory and immediacy. In Callum Youde’s new body of work, ordinary life becomes both subject and material: the objects handled without thought, the music playing in the background, the fragments of conversations, symbols and gestures that accumulate over time. What begins as structure – grids, borders, divided surfaces, slowly unravels through spontaneous marks, handwritten notes and imperfect forms, creating paintings that feel both deeply personal and deliberately unresolved.

“My work is informed by the everyday stories that unfold around me through the daily act of living. I draw from my immediate surroundings and the soundtracks that accompany my life – the things I see, the objects I use, the music I listen to, and the small, often overlooked details that shape routine and experience.

These paintings begin with simple structure – grids, borders and divided spaces – that suggest order and control. I use these frameworks as a way to organise the surface, then disrupt them with loose, instinctive marks that feel immediate and unfiltered. This push and pull reflects an ongoing negotiation between structure and spontaneity, control and instinct”.

“Within these spaces, a visual language emerges that is deliberately simple, sometimes awkward, allowing emotion to surface without refinement. There is a childlike quality to the imagery: a sun drawn in quick lines, a house reduced to its most basic form, a flower or vessel rendered almost carelessly. These familiar forms act as fragments of recognition, while handwritten text introduces moments of intimacy and vulnerability”.

Materially, I work with spray paint, oil, and quick mark-making to create surfaces that both feel deliberate and temporary. Soft edges, overspray, and visible revisions keep the paintings open – never fully resolved. Even in more minimal works, where space is left exposed, there is a sense that something has been removed, covered or withheld.

Colour operates both intuitively and deliberately. Bright, almost fluorescent tones sit against darker, muted grounds, creating shifts between tension and release. Compositions are often divided into panels or sections, suggesting windows or stages – spaces where different visual languages coexist but do not fully settle.

Ultimately, the work holds contradiction: playfulness and unease, clarity and obscurity, intention and accident. I am not interested in resolving these oppositions, but in allowing them to exist together, where meaning remains fluid and continuously forming”.

Callum’s work settles into a space between contradiction and coexistence. Raw expression and careful composition remain in constant dialogue. Childlike imagery meets darker undertones, vivid colour presses against muted, quieter spaces. Through surfaces that feel revised, exposed and intentionally unresolved, moments of intimacy and vulnerability emerge.

Find his show Soft Structures in the gallery throughout May and June or online now.

Please Contact the Gallery if you would like to arrange a visit outside of our general open hours.